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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1474924
This article is part of the Research Topic Interacting factors in the development of discourse practices from childhood to adulthood View all 3 articles

When to use a metaphor Metaphors in dialogical explanations with addressees of different expertise

Provisionally accepted
Ingrid Scharlau Ingrid Scharlau 1*Miriam Körber Miriam Körber 1Meghdut Sengupta Meghdut Sengupta 2Henning Wachsmuth Henning Wachsmuth 2
  • 1 Faculy of Arts and Humanities, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
  • 2 Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The present study aims at to understanding how metaphors are used in explanations. According to many current theories, metaphors have a conceptual function for the understanding of abstract objects. From this theoretical assumption, we derived the hypothesis that the lower the expertise of the addressee of an explanation, the more metaphors should be used. We tested this hypothesis on a relatively natural data set of 24 published videos with close to 100.000 words overall in which experts explain abstract, mostly scientific concepts to persons of different expertise, varying from minimal (children) to profound (expert). Contrary to our expectations, the frequency of metaphors did not decrease with expertise, but actually increased. This increase could be statistically substantiated with higher differences in expertise. The study contributes to a better understanding of the use of metaphors in actual explanatory processes and how metaphor use depends on contextual factors. It thus supports the expansion of the conceptual and linguistic perspective on metaphors to include the aspect of how metaphors are used by speakers.

    Keywords: metaphor, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, metaphor usage, Explaining, explanation

    Received: 02 Aug 2024; Accepted: 25 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Scharlau, Körber, Sengupta and Wachsmuth. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ingrid Scharlau, Faculy of Arts and Humanities, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

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