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Metaphor families
The gospel is taught in pictures: a path, a light, a foundation, a battle, a seed. This study reads the images two ways. It gathers every simile and clusters the images themselves into families; and it counts the words of fourteen source domains through the whole text, by decade, by calling and by speaker, to see which images rose, which faded, and whether the campus borrows its own.
What stands out
- 2,951 explicit figures in 10,635 talks, 1.62 per ten thousand words in the 1850s and 1.9 in the 2020s. The largest family is light (20.54%): “Then will. the Church stand as a light to the world.” (David O. McKay, 1912).
- The commonest source domains are family (95.51), the body (44.03), water (18.56), in words per ten thousand. Family and body words are mostly literal, which the domain count cannot tell apart; the rarer domains are the figurative ones.
- Family rose most from the early decades to the late (+60.31 per ten thousand words); money fell most (-5.22). Agriculture moved down by 2.26 and machines up by 2.06.
- Henry B. Eyring's “Steady in the Storms” (2022) is the most figurative talk in the corpus at 48.9 explicit figures per ten thousand words.
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Model card
- Explicit figures
- Sentences of six to sixty words matching a simile pattern ("is like a", "just as … so", "as a … does", "like a" followed by a stock image noun). The vehicle, the words from the cue to the end of the clause, is embedded with all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and clustered by k-means into 10 families, each named by words at least twice as common in it as outside and illustrated by the sentences nearest its centre.
- Source domains
- Fourteen hand-written lexicons of image words, counted per ten thousand words through the whole text regardless of whether a sentence is figurative. By decade (twenty-five or more talks), calling group (forty or more), gender, and speakers with eight or more talks since 1950. Trend is the mean of the last third of decades minus the first third.
- Known failure modes
- Domain words are counted whether used literally or figuratively: a story about a real harvest counts toward agriculture. The simile pattern misses metaphors without a cue word, which are most metaphors, and catches some literal comparisons. Family names are word lists. Body words include the heart and hands of ordinary idiom.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.