This article presents a quantitative cross-register comparison of the forms and frequency of linguistic metaphor in fiction based on a 45,000-word annotated corpus containing excerpts from 12 contemporary British-English novels sampled from the British National Corpus. The results for fiction are compared to those for three other registers, namely news texts, academic discourse and conversations. The linguistic manifestations of metaphor in the corpus were identified using the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al., 2010), a revised and extended version of the original Metaphor Identification Procedure, or MIP, as developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). Contrary to common expectations, fiction was not the register with the highest number of metaphors, but was situated in between academic discourse and news on the one hand, and conversation on the other. However, it turned out that metaphor signals and direct expressions of metaphor (e.g. simile) were typical of fiction, as has been claimed in the literature (e.g. Goatly, 1997; Lodge, 1977; Sayce, 1953). Based on these quantitative findings, this article will show that fiction does not contain more metaphors than the other registers, but rather, different ones.
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