Similes and sets

Similes and Sets

Patrick Hanks
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences1 and Brandeis University.

Abstract

This paper is a report on an analysis of the English preposition like. I investigated the 101,096 occurrences of this preposition in the British National Corpus (BNC). What is its normal role and function? It seems that like has a central role to play in cognition, more powerful than metaphor and going far beyond mere comparison of similarities. It is a truism that like introduces similes (e.g. “he looked like a broiled frog”), but this is only part of the story, true mainly when the preposition is attached to a verb of perception. Another function of this preposition, especially when it is attached to a noun, is to introduce a fuzzy set (e.g. “people like doctors an d nurses”). There are semantic similarities between these two functions.

This paper is complementary to the account of metaphor given within the framework of the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE) in Hanks 2004. A central tenet of TNE is that analogy is the motivating force, not merely of language change, but also of language in use. People make meanings by exploiting the belief structures associated with words words (lexical semantics) analogically. They talk about new things by comparing them to familiar concepts, shared concepts, and culturally identifiable stereotypes. And when people talk, they often want to say new things. For this reason, similes, which are more common than metaphors, have a central role in the theory.