Metaphor analysis meets lexical strings: finetuning the metaphor identification procedure for quantitative semantic analyses.

Recent years have witnessed the development of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/VU), a step-by-step protocol designed to identify metaphorically-used words in discourse. However, MIP(VU)'s merits notwithstanding, the procedure poses a problem to scholars intending to use its output as the basis for a semantic field analysis involving a quantitative component. Depending on the research question, metaphor analysts may be interested in chunks of language situated above the procedure's standardized level of analysis (i.