Metaphor Analysis — Conceptual and Critical Metaphor Analysis
Also known as: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis, Metaphor Elicitation, Critical Metaphor Analysis, Linguistic Metaphor Analysis
Metaphor Analysis is a qualitative method that identifies, classifies, and interprets the metaphors embedded in language to reveal how speakers and writers conceptualise experience, construct meaning, and exercise ideological influence. Grounded in Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, it treats metaphor not as a literary decoration but as a fundamental cognitive structure — ARGUMENT IS WAR, TIME IS MONEY — that shapes how people think, reason, and act. It is widely applied in psychology, education, political discourse, health communication, and organisational research.
Key highlights
- Reveals unconscious cognitive frameworks that speakers themselves may not be aware of, providing access to implicit meaning not captured by explicit attitude measures.
- Applicable to any naturally occurring or elicited textual data — from clinical interviews to political speeches to social media corpora — without requiring participant reactivity.
- Grounded in a well-developed theoretical tradition (Conceptual Metaphor Theory; Critical Metaphor Analysis) with standardised identification procedures (MIP/MIPVU) that improve replicability.
- Bridges individual cognition and social discourse, making it useful for both psychological and critical-sociological research questions.
- Can be combined with corpus linguistics tools to handle large datasets, enabling both micro-level close reading and macro-level frequency analysis.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Metaphor Analysis is appropriate when the research question concerns how people cognitively frame an experience, issue, or phenomenon — how illness, leadership, change, learning, or policy is conceptualised in language rather than what attitudes or behaviours are measured. It suits exploratory and interpretive questions in education (how students conceptualise a subject), health (how patients talk about illness), political science (how leaders frame policy), and organisational research (how employees describe culture). It is NOT appropriate when the research goal is to measure the frequency of an attitude, test a hypothesis about behaviour, or generate a grounded theory of a social process; those purposes call for survey methods, experimental designs, or grounded theory respectively. A sufficiently rich textual corpus is a hard prerequisite — thin or highly structured data (closed questionnaires, tick-box surveys) will not yield meaningful metaphor analysis.
Strengths & limitations
- Reveals unconscious cognitive frameworks that speakers themselves may not be aware of, providing access to implicit meaning not captured by explicit attitude measures.
- Applicable to any naturally occurring or elicited textual data — from clinical interviews to political speeches to social media corpora — without requiring participant reactivity.
- Grounded in a well-developed theoretical tradition (Conceptual Metaphor Theory; Critical Metaphor Analysis) with standardised identification procedures (MIP/MIPVU) that improve replicability.
- Bridges individual cognition and social discourse, making it useful for both psychological and critical-sociological research questions.
- Can be combined with corpus linguistics tools to handle large datasets, enabling both micro-level close reading and macro-level frequency analysis.
- Inter-rater reliability in metaphor identification can be modest; the boundary between literal and metaphorical language is contested, and MIP/MIPVU does not eliminate judgment calls.
- Findings are context-specific and interpretive — they describe the conceptual framings in a particular corpus and cannot be statistically generalised to a population.
- The method does not capture non-linguistic meaning (gesture, image, tone), limiting its reach when multimodal data are relevant.
- Corpus compilation and systematic metaphor identification are time-intensive, especially for large datasets where software assistance is only partial.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How is Metaphor Analysis different from Discourse Analysis?
Discourse Analysis examines how language constructs social reality at the level of text and context — power relations, genre, ideology, and social identity are all in scope. Metaphor Analysis is more narrowly focused on figurative mappings between conceptual domains. The two often overlap: Critical Metaphor Analysis is explicitly a sub-strand of critical discourse analysis, using metaphor as the analytic entry point. A study can use both: discourse analysis for broad structural features and metaphor analysis to zoom in on conceptual framing.
Do I need a large corpus for Metaphor Analysis?
Not necessarily. Single-case or small-corpus metaphor analysis — for example, close reading of one interview or one speech — is legitimate and can yield rich interpretive insight. Larger corpora allow frequency claims and comparisons across groups or time points. The decision depends on your research question: depth of interpretation versus breadth of patterning. Whichever scale you use, the identification procedure should be documented and applied consistently.
What software tools support Metaphor Analysis?
For corpus-level work, concordancing software (AntConc, Sketch Engine, Wordsmith) helps retrieve lexical items associated with a source domain across large text collections. ATLAS.ti and NVivo can support coding and grouping of metaphorical expressions. Specialised tools such as MetaNet and MIPVU annotation guides assist systematic identification. However, conceptual grouping and interpretation remain human analytical tasks — no software automates the core cognitive work.
Can Metaphor Analysis be combined with quantitative methods?
Yes. Frequency counts of metaphor families across groups (patients vs. clinicians, left vs. right-wing newspapers) provide a quantitative dimension without requiring statistical inference. Some researchers combine corpus-based metaphor frequency with survey data to test whether conceptual framing predicts attitudes or behaviours — a form of mixed-methods design. The qualitative interpretive work, however, must precede quantification, because metaphors must be identified and categorised before they can be counted meaningfully.
What is the difference between Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis?
Conceptual Metaphor Analysis (stemming from Lakoff and Johnson) focuses on mapping the cognitive structure of source-to-target domain projections — its goal is descriptive and cognitive. Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black) adds a normative and political dimension: it asks which metaphors are strategically chosen by powerful actors, what ideological work they do, whose interests they serve, and what alternative frames might exist. CMA is explicitly evaluative; Conceptual Metaphor Analysis aims to be descriptive.
Sources
- 1.Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226468013
- 2.Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 3). Metaphor Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/qualitative/metaphor-analysis