Abstract

The Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) is a standardized protocol for identifying metaphorically used language; however, its procedural guidelines were developed primarily for European languages. Drawing on a bilingual corpus comprising 74 linguistic metaphors extracted from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and Phạm Văn’s 2020 Vietnamese translation, Hạt Ngọc Trai, this article documents three procedural adaptations required when applying MIPVU to Vietnamese: (1) segmenting lexical units before dictionary consultation to address the use of orthographic spaces as syllable boundaries, including in reduplicative expressions (từ láy); (2) prioritizing contemporary dictionary meanings when determining the basic meanings of Sino-Vietnamese words; and (3) applying a substitution test to distinguish như as a productive comparison marker from its grammaticalized uses. Each adaptation is supported by corpus evidence and tested against all 74 items. The proposed adaptations provide a citable methodological precedent for future MIPVU research on Vietnamese and other typologically similar languages.

Keywords: Metaphor identification, MIPVU, reduplication, Sino-Vietnamese, translation studies, Vietnamese linguistics.