Sexual source domain selection: contrasting Reddit forums and academia in American English

Abstract

This research contrasts metaphor usage across formal and informal writing in American English. The data was taken from a public forum, Reddit, and a Psychology and Behavioral Sciences database to contrast the ways that users across both genres choose metaphor when talking about the same topic: sex. The primary focus of this research is to compare frequency and type of source domain selection between the two datasets, but the choice of source-target pairing was also relevant in distinguishing metaphor use and revealed potentially genre-motivated differences.