The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language

In the summer of 2000, an international group of ten metaphor scholars came together in Amsterdam for a three-day expert meeting sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in order to discuss whether it was even possible to develop a reliable method for metaphor identification in language. At that time many linguists were not interested in the methods and techniques needed for metaphor identification, while others doubted whether one tool for all could even be developed. The expert meeting was triggered by heated discussions of this issue in the late 1990s (see Steen, 2002), indicating an intimidating number of issues. The participants of the Amsterdam meeting represented a wide…