Figurative Language: Genre and Register
Figurative Language, Genre and Register brings together methods from discourse analysis and corpus linguistics in a cutting-edge study of figurative language in spoken and written discourse. The authors combine their extensive experience in figurative language research to explore metaphor and metonymy within a variety of genres and registers, at both the discourse and lexical level. They present a clear framework for analysis which allows for an accurate and complete description of figurative language as it is used by members of different discourse communities. This framework is applied to new data as well as to the authors' past research to show how its use can achieve new insights. Figurative language is shown to be pervasive and inescapable, but it is also suggested that it varies significantly across genres. Hence, the use of figurative language can both help and hinder communication, especially when boundaries between genres and discourse communities are crossed. Int