When MIPVU goes to no man’s land: a new language resource for hybrid, morpheme-based metaphor identification in Hungarian

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present a new language resource for metaphor analysis in corpora that is (i) a MIPVU-inspired, morpheme-based process for identifying metaphor in Hungarian and (ii) the refinement and innovative version of metaphor identification extending the scope of the process to multi-word expressions. The elaboration of language-specific protocols in metaphor identification has become one of the central endeavors in contemporary cross-linguistic research on metaphor, but there is a gap in the field regarding languages with rich morphology, especially in the case of Hungarian. To fill this gap, we developed a hybrid, morpheme-based version of the original method, which can handle morphologically complex metaphorical expressions. Additional innovations of our protocol are the measurement and tagging of idiomaticity in metaphors based on collocation analysis and the identification of semantic relationships between the components of metaphorical expressions. The present paper discusses both the theoretical motivation and the practical details of the adapted method for metaphor identification. As a conclusion, the presented protocol can provide new answers to the questions of metaphor identification in languages with rich morphology and shed new light on the internal semantic organization of linguistic metaphors.