M2: IICM Framework

"What is the IICM?"

It is the Integrated-Approach to the Identification of Conceptual Metaphors (Chen, 2013)

Why use it?

1. It is “ inductive, generates more comprehensive results than the use of pre-determined search strings and most importantly, is repeatable and empirical. ” (Chen, 2013, p4)
2. “ The key advantage of this approach is that it provides a common springboard for academic disagreements due to the systematicity of the IICM ” (Chen, 2013, p29)

The IICM is split into 3 phases:

Phase 1:

After running through the corpus through Wmatrix, we identify candidate USAS semantic categories for analysis based on frequency.

We "utilize a reference corpora, the British National Corpus…. consisting of over 100 million words"(Bednarek, 2008) 

In-depth analysis is conducted in three major areas:

• USAS Semantic Domains
• Keyness
• Concordance

Phase 2:

Formulating the associated Conceptual Metaphors using a proposed three-step approach:

Step One: Identifying the Collocations & Lexical items for Metaphorical analysis (via Sketch Engine)

Step Two: The identification of Conceptual Keys/Scenarios  (Charteris-Black, 2004; Musolff, 2004)

Step Three : The identification of the range of conceptual metaphors through the reclassification and comparison

Phase 3:

• Generalizing the findings in order to suggest understanding or thought patterns that construct or constrain people’s beliefs and actions through Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004).
• To understand the effects of these conceptual metaphors on the thought process of voters thereby allow us to perpetuate the applications of our project.