Similes and Sets

This paper is a report on an analysis of the English preposition like. I investigated the 101,096 occurrences of this preposition in the British National Corpus (BNC). What is its normal role and function? It seems that like has a central role to play in cognition, more powerful than metaphor and going far beyond mere comparison of similarities. It is a truism that like introduces similes (e.g. “he looked like a broiled frog”), but this is only part of the story, true mainly when the preposition is attached to a verb of perception. Another function of this preposition, especially when it is attached to a noun, is to introduce a fuzzy set (e.g. “people like doctors and nurses”). There are semantic similarities between these two functions. This paper is complementary to the account of metaphor given within the framework of the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE) in Hanks 2004. A central tenet of TNE is that analogy is the motivating force, not merely of language change, but also of language in use. People make meanings by exploiting the belief structures associated with words words (lexical semantics) analogically. They talk about new things by comparing them to familiar concepts, shared concepts, and culturally identifiable stereotypes. And when people talk, they often want to say new things. For this reason, similes, which are more common than metaphors, have a central role in the theory. Previous Literature on Similes There is a vast literature on metaphor, but the literature explicitly devoted to similes is less extensive. By leading authors on metaphor and figurative language (from Max Black 1962 to Glucksberg 2001) similes are generally either ignored or treated merely as a sort 1 This work was supported by the Wolfgang Paul Prize awarded to Christiane Fellbaum as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Zukunftinvestitionsprogramm. I am grateful to Rosamund Moon for comments on an earlier version of this paper.