A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2023

N

1881

Dictionaries; Figurative Language; Reference Materials; Language Usage; English; Inclusion; Phrase Structure; English (Second Language); Second Language Learning; Language Teachers; North American English; Armed Forces; Military Training; Semantics; Grammar; Verbs; Nonverbal Communication; Second Language Instruction; Social Media; Natural Language Processing; Foreign Countries; Computational Linguistics

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2023) upgrades ED619049 (ERIC) and finishes its work. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English--to include the language of "inclusion & exclusion" and "contempo-speak"--along with its distinguishing collocates. The first main entry word is "ablaze," and the last entry is "Zuckerberg" ("the Russian Mark Zuckerberg, etc."). At the bottom of many main entry words is red text that often contrasts figurative and literal usages, with a special emphasis on recovering the literal meaning of words, particularly if they have a military source. Finally each main entry word is tagged by target and source: the target or targets come first, and are separated from the source or sources by the colon mark. Tags for targets include ones like "time"; "resistance, opposition & defeat"; "enthusiasm"; "fictive motion"; "feeling, emotion & effect," etc. Tags for sources include ones like "military"; "boat"; "direction"; "weight"; "trips & journeys"; "animal," etc. Certain tags are considered as targets and sources: "epithet"; "movement"; "death & life"; "military"; "sign, signal & symbol"; "shape"; "mental health," etc. The tags were used to compile the thesaurus. The compiler is a lifelong EFL teacher of adult military students in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi), and his interest in figurative language arose during his work teaching the Defense Language Institute's American Language Course (ALC / DLI). The most important insight of this dictionary and thesaurus is how important figurative language is in every type of communication. For example, a common childhood game like a "tug-of-war" can describe a struggle for control on a plane that results in hundreds of fatalities, a "conversation" nowadays often suggests much more than simply a talk between two people, and an "uncanny valley" can refer to robots. The work has implications for ESL / EFL teaching, which tends to focus on the literal meanings of words, usually the first sense in a dictionary. Clearly, more attention can and should be paid to other senses of words, and this work will help to identify and classify them. It also suggests a pivot to language analysis and instruction based on conceptual metaphor. This is a reference for EFL / ESL teachers, curriculum developers, materials writers, and teacher trainers. But it should also be of interest to lexicographers, and it has attracted interest from experts interested in metaphor detection, natural language processing (NLP), and social-media analysis, some of whom are using the tool of artificial intelligence (AI). Hopefully, it will inspire better dictionaries and thesauri of this sort created by teams of people, just as early work by many individuals working in isolation on collocation culminated in the 2002 Oxford Collocations Dictionary. Preliminary short discussions based on the work include (1) 70 common metaphors (2) Collocation (3) Epithets (4) Persons (5) The "container" metaphor (6) Grammatical metaphor, fictive verbs, etc. (7) Past, present and future (8) Allusions (9) Euphemisms (10) Gestures and bodily reactions (11) Shapes and parts-whole (12) Animacy (13) Persistence, survival and endurance (14) Quotations (15) Synonyms and opposites (16) Lessons and exercises (17) To the EFL / ESL teacher, which focuses on how the dictionary and thesaurus impacts the knowledge and experience base of the teacher and (18) An alphabetized list of the thesaurus categories. [For the previous edition (2022), see ED619049.]

As Provided

2023

ED628218