Taking MIPVU Further Around the World—And Through the Ages: MIPVU for Religion-Related Texts: Challenges and Benefits

MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU Amsterdam) is a method for identifying linguistic metaphors in contemporary English, developed on the basis of newspaper and academic texts, oral conversations, and fiction. Subsequently, it has been successfully used to assess the frequency of metaphoric usage in non-English texts. Depending on the language in question and its characteristics, some of the MIPVU guidelines (especially those concerning lexical units and grammatical categories) have to be adapted to produce more reliable results. The present contribution summarizes the main steps of the procedure and reflects on its applicability to religious and religion-related texts (both historical and contemporary) analysed within the CRC 1475 “Metaphors of Religion.” The examples include texts in Biblical Hebrew, Literary Sinitic of Korean provenance, Old and Middle High German, and English online-forum posts on religious topics. The authors discuss the challenges and benefits arising from applying MIPVU to their corpora and the possible ways of adjusting the MIPVU guidelines to their research goals.