Metaphor annotation for German

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2556–2562 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2556 Metaphor Annotation for German Markus Egg, Valia Kordoni Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin {markus.egg, evangelia.kordoni}@hu-berlin.de Abstract The paper presents current work on a German corpus annotated for metaphor. Metaphors denote entities or situations that are in some sense similar to the literal referent, e.g., when Handschrift ‘signature’ is used in the sense of ‘distinguishing mark’ or the suppression of hopes is introduced by the verb versch¨utten ‘bury’. The corpus is part of a project on register, hence, includes material from different registers that represent register variation along a number of important dimensions, but we believe that it is of interest to research on metaphor in general. The corpus extends previous annotation initiatives in that it not only annotates the metaphoric expressions themselves but also their respective relevant contexts that trigger a metaphorical interpretation of the expressions. For the corpus, we developed extended annotation guidelines, which specifically focus not only on the identification of these metaphoric contexts but also analyse in detail specific linguistic challenges for metaphor annotation that emerge due to the grammar of German. Keywords: metaphor, register, annotation 1. Introduction In this paper, we present our work on a German corpus an- notated for metaphor. The corpus is compiled and anno- tated in a project on the interdependence of metaphors and register. Its parts represent a number of different registers, but we expect the corpus to be of interest to research on metaphor in general. The paper is structured as follows. After a short outline of the underlying theoretical concepts and a review of previ- ous work, we describe the composition, compilation, and annotation of the corpus in detail. We also present first re- sults of the annotation, which show clear qualitative and quantitative differences in the metaphor usage in the dif- ferent registers in the corpus. These differences are then correlated with specific properties of registers. 2. Theoretical background This section introduces the two phenomena of metaphor and register, and the way in which they are related. 2.1. Metaphor Metaphors use an expression to refer to an entity that is similar to the referent of the literal interpretation of the ex- pression. Metaphor theories reconstruct this similarity in different ways (for an overview see e.g. the chapters 2-4 in Ritchie (2013)). In the following, we will assume the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT; Lakoff (1993)) and describe concrete specimens of metaphors in this framework, but the work presented in this paper does not presuppose a specific metaphor theory. Following CMT, we base the similarity between the literal and the metaphorical referent on an underlying mapping that maps the structure of a ‘source domain’, of which the literal referent is a part, onto a ‘target domain’, which com- prises the entity denoted in the metaphorical interpretation of the respective expression. The effect of this mapping is …

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