'The Michael Jordan of greatness'—Extracting Vossian antonomasia from two decades of The New York Times, 1987–2007. (28th January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fischer, Frank; Jäschke, Robert
• Is Part Of: Digital scholarship in the humanties. Volume 35:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 34
• Page End: 42
• Publication Date: 2019-01-28
• Subjects: Philology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Computational linguistics -- Periodicals; 410.285
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqy087
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2055-768X

Abstract

Abstract: Vossian antonomasia is a prolific stylistic device, in use since antiquity. It can compress the introduction or description of a person or another named entity into a terse, poignant formulation and can best be explained by an example: When Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen is described as 'the Mozart of chess', it is Vossian antonomasia we are dealing with. The pattern is simple: A source (Mozart) is used to describe a target (Magnus Carlsen), the transfer of meaning is reached via a modifier ('of chess'). This phenomenon has been discussed before (as 'metaphorical antonomasia' or, with special focus on the source object, as 'paragons'), but no corpus-based approach has been undertaken as yet to explore its breadth and variety. We are looking into a full-text newspaper corpus ( The New York Times, 1987–2007) and describe a new method for the automatic extraction of Vossian antonomasia based on Wikidata entities. Our analysis offers new insights into the occurrence of popular paragons and their distribution.