Mapping metaphors of wealth and want: a digital approach

The AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project aims to provide data on the extent and development of metaphor across the history of English. It uses the full database of the Historical Thesaurus of English, which extensively categorises and classifies the recorded vocabulary of the English language from Old English to the present day. By using this database to map semantic categories onto one another, and thus showing lexical overlap in different conceptual fields, we aim in the project to provide results which will demonstrate the widespread, systematic and far-reaching impact of metaphor on English. This paper outlines the digital and linguistic methodologies used by the project, and presents a case study of the semantic categories of wealth and poverty, demonstrating the metaphorical links between these categories and the rest of the language. In addition, we discuss the nature of lexical overlap as we use it in the project, and discuss both the quantitative and diachronic dimensions of the data we are manipulating and their implications for projects of this type.