Procedure for identifying metaphorical scenes (PIMS) : The case of spatial and abstract relations

The Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS) (Johansson Falck & Okonski, accepted) was developed to identify metaphorical meaning that extends over phrases or longer stretches of text, but it can also be used to identify metaphorically understood concepts coded by individual words. It focuses on scenes evoked by linguistic expressions to distinguish metaphorical, non-metaphorical, and ambiguous cases. In this paper, we pay particular attention to the relationships evoked by prepositional constructions and the elements that are part of these relationships. Our main aims are to show how PIMS can be used to identify metaphors in language that includes prepositions and to test the reliability of the procedure. We first describe the tricky nature of prepositions and why PIMS is needed in this particular context. Then we introduce the procedure and present two studies that test its reliability. In Study 1, PIMS was applied to a large corpus of sentences containing the preposition into (n = 8,500 instances). In Study 2, we analyze a mixed-preposition text that was previously used in a MIPVU study (Nacey, Dorst, Krennmayr, & Reijnierse, 2019a) in order to directly compare the reliability of PIMS to previous procedures for analyzing prepositions