A Polish adaptation of the usage-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis in caregiver interactions with children

Abstract

As metaphors are difficult to elicit through experimental tools, especially at a young age, it has been proposed that corpora of naturalistic interactions between children and their primary caregivers present an alternative avenue for accessing the language of very young speakers (Gaskins et al., 2023). However, this approach has been developed with English data in mind, adding to the predominantly Anglocentric nature of child language research. The current article demonstrates how the approach can be adapted for use with children acquiring Polish and, by extension, other inflected Slavic languages, where metaphors are often encoded word-internally. The article justifies the motivations which have shaped the development of this adaptation and demonstrates what metaphors it has unearthed in the speech of a Polish-speaking two- to five-year-old child, and her primary caregivers. It is argued that the approach could carry a significant potential in future research if applied to densely sampled data from monolingual acquisition in Polish settings.