Sunken ships and screaming banshees: metaphor and evaluation in film reviews

It has been suggested that metaphor often performs some sort of evaluative function. However, there have few empirical studies addressing this issue. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which a needs be creative in order perform an function, or whether are differences according type evaluation, such as its degree explicitness and polarity. In investigate these questions, 94 film reviews from Internet Movie Database (IMDB) were annotated for conventional metaphor, positive negative, inscribed invoked evaluation. Approximately half metaphors our corpus found Creative significantly more likely function than metaphors. Metaphorical evaluation was negative non-metaphorical Both used frequently tendency towards stronger From theoretical perspective, findings call into question fundamental assumptions role performing claim, made Systemic Functional Linguistics literature, invariably ‘provokes’ attitudinal meanings. We shown it can do so, but does not always so. The study also offers methodological contributions, by introducing new protocol annotation well detailed guidelines coding at different levels explicitness.