Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

While looking for something else, I accidentally came across a database of cognitive metaphors: http://web.archive.org/web/200807180217 ... metaphors/
This gives a long list of standard metaphors with examples. A couple of my favourites:
IDEAS are FOOD: That class gave me food for thought. His idea was half-baked. He insisted on sugar-coating his warnings. She has an insatiable curiosity.
PEOPLE are PLANTS: She's a late bloomer. She is in the flower of youth. She's let herself go to seed.

Any favourites? Any ideas how to exploit this in research?

This is fun. For research, it certainly could useful for a metaphor analysis of interviews. When looking at beliefs, the way people describe their worlds using metaphors is useful. There is a paper by Farrell titled 'The teacher is an octopus' (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10 ... 4cG2YgisHU) which is a metaphor analysis of teachers' beliefs about the classroom ('teaching is war' was one that came from that paper too, I think). When I considering doing a metaphor analysis on my interview data, I found it hard to get started with identifying metaphors. Perhaps this site would have been a good way for me to have got a foot in, so to speak. Research is a journey, you see.

Anyway, the ones I like from this site are:
'the mind is a brittle object' - 'his mind snapped', 'he's fragile';
'ideas are food' - 'let me chew on that for a while', and 'I'm tired of warmed-over theories'. There are a lot of subcategories in the 'ideas are food' metaphor. Such sweet concepts!