Toward a more textual, as opposed to conceptual, approach in metaphor research A case study of How to Cook a Husband

This article proposes a new method of analyzing metaphorical expressions from a linguistic perspective. By comparing a metaphorical text and its unmetaphorized version, we suggest that a small set of lexical differences can lead to totally different interpretations. The proposed method captures this phenomenon by 1) describing how phrases in a text link to situational concepts and 2) representing the interpretation as a superimposition of these concepts through a newly introduced (usually ad hoc) superordinate schema. The proposed method has the advantages over the previous accounts in cognitive linguistics of being able to specify how target and base concepts are evoked in a text.