Kimmel  Chapter 12 Metaphors and Software-assisted Cognitive Stylistics ______________________________________________________________ Michael Kimmel Abstract This paper reports on an ongoing project on literary metaphor that applies analytical tools from cognitive linguistics (CL) to six English novellas and presents a case study. The project focuses on complex tropes, metaphors, coherence and cohesion in text units as well as text cues that involve the reader at a bodily level. Its hallmark is systematic and multi-level metaphor tagging and analysis with the qualitative coding software ATLAS.ti 5.2. My aim here is to raise three methodological points of increasing specificity. First, I explain the general benefits of a software-assisted qualitative analysis. Second, I present a flexible and powerful approach for metaphor coding (which is extendable to non- literary applications). Third, I illustrate the gains from applying the approach to literature at a descriptive level, then in a more integrative literary analysis, and finally with regard to a novella’s general trends in metaphor use. Keywords: cognitive linguistics, cognitive stylistics, conceptual metaphor, literary embodiment, image schemata, software-assisted analysis 1. Literary metaphor from a cognitive linguistic (CL) angle Metaphors, in literature as in everyday speech, depend upon a word or phrase (a source- or vehicle-term) creating semantic tension with its cotext or context. Successfully resolving this tension is a unique faculty of the human mind and requires properties from the vehicle’s conceptual domain to be mapped to an explicit or implicit target domain. This invariably selective feature transfer may include attributes, images, inferential structure, or affect structure. CL demonstrates that thousands of everyday metaphorical expressions constitute highly systematic sets (e.g., LIFE IS A JOURNEY, LIFE IS A DAY, LIFE IS A PLANT; GOOD IS UP, GOOD IS BRIGHT), each with a single underlying logic. The systematicity points to production/reception schemata for metaphors called conceptual metaphors. According to Lakoff and Turner (1989), most literary metaphors are rooted in everyday conceptual metaphors and not based on “strangification” vis-à-vis everyday cognition. The prototypical CL analysis of metaphor gathers expressions from across a text or corpus and then draws together patterns similar either in imagery or inferential entailments. About two dozen case studies have applied this technique to literary narrative and its recurrent meaning patterns (see Steen and Gibbs 2004). Traditionally-minded literary theorists find this approach wanting (e.g., Downes 1993), partly because they emphasize close stylistic readings of what specific metaphors do in context, and partly because they believe that old-fashioned methods receive only a cognitive re-labeling. My position in this debate is that CL theory can genuinely enrich a stylistic perspective by paying attention to