ABSTRACT
Consider the following excerpt of a conversation, from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, between an American man and woman, lying in bed, discussing, at this point, the woman’s prior marriage. Pay attention to the participants’ different verbal metaphors (some candidate phrases containing metaphorically used words are presented in boldface) (Du Bois & Englebretson, 2004):
Pamela: I used to have this . . . sort of, standard line, . . . that, there were two things I got out of . . . my marriage. One was a name that was easy to spell, and one was . . . a child. . . . That . . . really got me grounded. But, the fact of the matter is, . . . that the marriage itself, I mean as hellish as it was . . . it’s like it pulled me under, like a giant octopus, or a giant, . . . giant shark. And it pulled me all the way under. And then, . . . and there I was, it was like the silent scream and then, . . . then I found that . . . I was on my own two feet again. And it really was . . . .what was hell in that . . . that marriage became, . . . became a way out for me. . . . It was the flip side . . . It’s like sometimes you go through things, . . . and you come out the other side of them, you . . . come out so much better. . . . And if I hadn’t had that, if I hadn’t had . . .
