well-being of the body as metaphor for society and mind

This book is a corpus-based study of the metaphors drawn from the human body and coproreality in Early Modern and Present-day English texts. The focus is on the development of conceptual mappings between source and target domains from the EModE to the PDE period. The primary research questions concern metaphor extendedness and SOCIETY AS BODY and MIND AS BODY mappings. Using electronic corpora this book compares metaphor use in the two periods in order to establish whether there are notable differences in these two above mentioned respects. The key concepts under consideration here are metaphor strength and metaphor productivity. Metaphor extendedness is viewed here as indicative of metaphor strenght, and the proliferation of source domain items in either target domain as indicative of metaphor productivity within that target domain.