Narrative, Metaphor, and Conceptual Blending in “The Hanging Tree”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using traditional analytic techniques as well as methods drawn from narrative theory and cognitive linguistics, this paper explores the relationships between the song “The Hanging Tree” (performed by Marty Robbins), its original use in the 1959 Western of the same name (scored by Max Steiner), and the novella on which the movie is based (by Dorothy Johnson). Lakoff and Johnson’s “Location Event-Structure Metaphor” allows Zbikowski’s conceptual metaphor PITCH RELATIONSHIPS ARE RELATIONSHIPS IN VERTICAL SPACE to engage concepts of time, events, and narrative. This context reveals a contradiction in the cross-domain mapping between music and text in the song. The seventh scale degree is “left hanging” in the body of the song, pointing to the imminent event of hanging. Yet after the hanging is averted, the leading tone is prominently regained in the same register and resolved. Two possibilities are considered: 1) Conventional tonal metaphors rather than locally-defined metaphors have priority at various moments in a particular genre. 2) The metaphor is musically transformed through “frame-shifting” to create a new conceptual blend. Finally, the re-arrangement of the song in the movie causes this shift to occur differently, raising issues concerning the role of the singer as cinematic narrator.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".