This paper presents the background, findings, and implications of a new line of research on the technical identification of linguistic metaphor. Inspired by the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor launched by Lakoff and Johnson, a new theoretical framework and operational definition has been developed for the identification of metaphorical expressions in authentic discourse. The paper presents a brief report of two reliability studies of the first stage of the approach, and spells out how it may be applied in linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical text analysis with reference to a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. [G.S.]