Metaphors in the ministries revisited: from WAR to the hospital ward

In this study I return to the metaphorical language used by Italian Ministers, revisiting in part research that I conducted about five years ago (Philip 2009, Philip 2010). In the original study, I was investigating the metaphors used by women Ministers to see if their language could be said to reveal particularly feminine traits, including gender stereotyped thematic material. That study was corpus driven, and led me to develop a method for locating potential metaphors in corpus data using corpus tools which can be used for languages which are not supported by metaphor analysis tools such as WMatrix (Rayson 2005). The method uses the Word List, Key Word and Concordance options in WordSmith Tools 4.0 (Scott, 2004) and is described in detail in Philip (2012).