Sardinha: "Metaphor probabilities in corpora" (2008)

In his contribution to Confronting Metaphor in Use, Tony Sardinha argues that metaphor researchers should care more about the probabilities that a given word will be used metaphorically in a given corpus genre.

To illustrate his ideas, he reports a large number of metaphor probabilities taken from a highly specialized corpus of Brazilian Portuguese.

The article cites three interesting sources that are quite alien to metaphor theory proper:

• The anthology Probabilistic Linguistics (2003), edited by Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy.
• A number of articles from the early 1990s by the British linguist Michael A. K. Halliday, a veteran advocate for corpus linguistics.
• Michael Hoey: "The textual priming of lexis" (2004); this paper is interesting for having a bottom-up, construction-grammar style of explanation.