Sarah Turner

Metaphor is a pervasive feature of discourse and a powerful lens for examining cognition, emotion, and ideology. Large-scale analysis, however, has been constrained by the need for manual annotation due to the context-sensitive nature of metaphor. This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate metaphor identification in full texts. We compare three methods: (i) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where the model is provided with a codebook and instructed to annotate texts based on its rules and examples; (ii) prompt engineering, where we design task-specific verbal instructions; and (iii) fine-tuning, where the model is trained on hand-coded texts to optimize performance. Within prompt engineering, we test zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought strategies. Our results show that state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs can achieve high accuracy, with fine-tuning yielding a median F1 score of 0.79. A comparison of human and LLM outputs reveals that most discrepancies are systematic, reflecting well-known grey areas and conceptual challenges in metaphor theory. We propose that LLMs can be used to at least partly automate metaphor identification and can serve as a testbed for developing and refining metaphor identification protocols and the theory that underpins them.

Pregnancy loss continues to occupy an uncomfortable space in public discourse. This article analyses articles in the UK press published between 2013 and 2023 referencing the Baby Loss Awareness Week (BLAW) that focus on narratives of personal experience of pregnancy loss. These narratives sit between the personal and the public, and constitute examples of public grieving that serve a range of purposes, from the expression of continuing bonds with the miscarried or stillborn baby, the desire to share one's experience of loss, and often to the wish to translate this experience into something positive. We draw on Finch's concept of ‘displaying families’, considering how they construct an identity for the baby who never lived and demonstrate continuing bonds with them. By analysing how this ‘identity work’ is made public, we explore how pregnancy loss is presented in public media as a transformative teleological experience for parents.

In this two-part article, we investigate communication with parents following the death of a child. Parents who have lost a child need to communicate with a wide range of professionals, and the quality of the communication that parents have with these groups can radically affect their experience of bereavement. In this UK-based interview study, we investigate why particular types of communication are deemed particularly (in)effective, by examining them in the light of parents' descriptions of the experience of loss.In the first part of the article, we reported findings from our in-depth content analysis of these interviews, discussing the ways in which the death of a child was experienced and how their accounts relate to previous work in the area, and then exploring the parents' accounts of the kinds of communication they had with healthcare professionals involved. In this second part of the article, we consider the wider network of professionals with whom parents may come into contact following the death of a child. We conclude by discussing the ways in which effective care and communication resonates with, and takes account of, the experiences of the bereaved.

This chapter presents the main conclusions from a study designed to investigate the ways in which UK Civil Servants use metaphor in creative and conventional ways to provide positive and negative evaluations of their workplace experiences. It is argued that the findings from the study have important implications for metaphor theory. The findings provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the relationship between evaluation, creativity, and metaphor. The examples discussed in the study show how creativity often comes through subverting the norms of use of a particular metaphor category, or altering the valence from its conventional use (e.g. military metaphors being positive, or family metaphors being negative). It is suggested that the study provides insight into the rich and varied experiences of this group of people in their workplace. It also shows the myriad ways in which people push at the boundaries of linguistic creativity in their efforts to describe the qualitative nature of their experiences. Finally, it demonstrates that metaphor can be a powerful tool for the nuanced expression of complex and ambiguous evaluation, particularly when it is used creatively.

In this two-part article, we investigate communication with parents following the death of a child. Parents who have lost a child need to communicate with a wide range of professionals, and the quality of the communication that parents have with these groups can radically affect their experience of bereavement. In this UK-based interview study, we investigate why particular types of communication are deemed particularly (in)effective, by examining them in the light of parents’ descriptions of the experience of loss. In this first part of the article, we report findings from our in-depth content analysis of these interviews, discussing the ways in which the death of a child was experienced and then exploring the parents’ accounts of the communication they had with healthcare professionals involved. In the second part of the article, published in a subsequent issue of this journal, we consider the wider network of professionals with whom parents may come into contact following the death of a child. We conclude by discussing the ways in which effective care and communication resonates with, and takes account of, the experiences of the bereaved.

Objectives To offer an interpretation of bereaved parents’ evaluations of communication with healthcare practitioners (HCPs) surrounding the death of a child. Design Interpretative qualitative study employing thematic and linguistic analyses of metaphor embedded in interview data. Setting England and Scotland. Participants 24 bereaved parents (21 women, 3 men). Methods Participants were recruited through the True Colours Trust website and mailing list, similar UK charities and word of mouth. Following interviews in person or via video-conferencing platforms (Skype/Zoom), transcripts first underwent thematic and subsequently linguistic analyses supported by NVivo. A focused analysis of metaphors used by the parents was undertaken to allow in-depth interpretation of how they conceptualised their experiences. Results The findings illuminate the ways parents experienced communication with HCPs surrounding the death of a child. Key findings from this study suggest that good communication with HCPs following the death of a child should acknowledge parental identity (and that of their child as an individual) and offer opportunities for them to enact this; taking account their emotional and physical experiences; and accommodate their altered experiences of time. Conclusions This study suggests that HCPs when communicating with bereaved parents need to recognise, and seek to comprehend, the ways in which the loss impacts on an individual’s identity as a parent, the ‘physical’ nature of the emotions that can be unleashed and the ways in which the death of a child can alter their metaphorical conceptions of time.

It has been suggested that metaphor often performs some sort of evaluative function. However, there have been few empirical studies addressing this issue. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which a metaphor needs to becreativein order to perform an evaluative function, or whether there are differences according to the type of evaluation, such as its degree of explicitness and its polarity. In order to investigate these questions, 94 film reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) were annotated for creative and conventional metaphor, and for positive and negative, inscribed and invoked evaluation. Approximately half of the metaphors in our corpus were found to perform an evaluative function. Creative metaphors were significantly more likely to perform an evaluative function than conventional metaphors. Metaphorical evaluation was found to be significantly more negative than non-metaphorical evaluation. Both creative and conventional metaphors were used more frequently to perform inscribed evaluation than invoked evaluation. However, the tendency towards inscribed evaluation was stronger for conventional metaphors than for creative metaphors. From a theoretical perspective, these findings call into question fundamental assumptions about the role of metaphor in performing evaluation, such as the claim, made in the Systemic Functional Linguistics literature, that metaphor invariably ‘provokes’ attitudinal meanings. We have shown that itcando so, but that it does notalwaysdo so. The study also offers methodological contributions, by introducing a new protocol for the annotation of creative metaphors as well as detailed guidelines for coding evaluation at different levels of explicitness.

In the four decades since 1980, US colleges and universities have seen the number of students from abroad quadruple. This rise in enrollment and degree attainment affects the global supply of highly educated workers, the flow of talent to the US labor market, and the financing of US higher education. Yet, the impacts are far from uniform, with significant differences evident by level of study and type of institution. The determinants of foreign flows to US colleges and universities reflect both changes in student demand from abroad and the variation in market circumstances of colleges and universities, with visa policies serving a mediating role. The consequences of these market mechanisms impact global talent development, the resources of colleges and universities, and labor markets in the United States and countries sending students.

Income inequality in college attendance and graduation in the United States was troublingly large before the pandemic. Without an aggressive infusion of federal support for schools and students, these already sizable gaps will likely widen into chasms.

Pregnancy loss, encompassing miscarriage, stillbirth and termination for foetal abnormality, can be considered a particularly intense and unique form of bereavement, which engenders difficult or painful emotions. When people are talking about such emotions, they have been found to make extensive use of metaphor (Semino, 2011). In this paper, we use metaphor analysis of a small corpus of interviews with individuals in England who have suffered such losses, and people who support them, to explore the nature of the bereavement. In particular, we focus on the ways in which metaphor is used to describe the experience of the loss, the effects that this loss has on people’s conceptions of themselves and their bodies, and the implications this has for recovery. We identify a number of characteristics that can lead the bereaved to conceptualise their realities in different ways, which have implications for the grieving process, the ways in which people respond to their grief, and ultimately their recovery.