Leiden University Student Repository

Logister, Anne (2024)

I Like Watching you Sleep: How metaphors of vision are used in Stepahanie Meyer’s Twilight

Bachelor thesis | Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

This research explores the use of visual metaphors in the novel Twilight. It focuses on identifying the most common metaphors related to sight, how their literal and figurative meanings differ, and if there are recurring patterns in their usage. The study then delves into whether these patterns reflect typical language use and compares them to a larger corpus like COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). Additionally, it analyses the ‘deliberateness’ of metaphors. The present work will apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory and other metaphor theories to Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2002). By examining these elements, the research aims to paint a picture of contemporary metaphor use. Deliberate metaphors were found to be less common than non-deliberate ones. There were clear and distinct collocate clusters for some words, but not for all. In those cases the contextual meaning and the grammatical structure of the sentence were needed to indicate metaphoricity. Mostly conventional...Show moreThis research explores the use of visual metaphors in the novel Twilight. It focuses on identifying the most common metaphors related to sight, how their literal and figurative meanings differ, and if there are recurring patterns in their usage. The study then delves into whether these patterns reflect typical language use and compares them to a larger corpus like COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). Additionally, it analyses the ‘deliberateness’ of metaphors. The present work will apply Conceptual Metaphor Theory and other metaphor theories to Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2002). By examining these elements, the research aims to paint a picture of contemporary metaphor use. Deliberate metaphors were found to be less common than non-deliberate ones. There were clear and distinct collocate clusters for some words, but not for all. In those cases the contextual meaning and the grammatical structure of the sentence were needed to indicate metaphoricity. Mostly conventional metaphors were found. This could be explained by Meyer’s younger target demographicShow less

Metaphor theory

Author

Logister, Anne

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Language Aquisition

Supervisors

Smakman, D

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en