Metaphors, Trauma and Symptoms

3 The multifaceteness of trauma metaphors

3.1 Chapter introduction

In the attempt to document qualitative, contextual nuances of trauma metaphors, existing mental health metaphor research, including trauma studies, mainly focused on the semantic features of metaphors. While presentational features of metaphors like CONVENTIONALITY, EMOTIONAL VALENCE, and PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES encode important information about trauma victims’ implicit emotional and cognitive inclinations, their systematic instantiations have rarely been investigated in large-scale data (refer to Section 2.3). As a result, the bivariate relationships between metaphor vehicles and topics received much more attention than the multifaceted nature of metaphor use, which ...