...and this is your brain on linguistics: just say no to words

This round of "scholarship" with predator and prey is a linguistics research proposal. I look at reports of sexual crimes that are framed within the predator-prey "metaphor" and count the frequency of the signifier perpetrator/"predator" signifying males, females, and juveniles and see if there's any correlation between/among relationships of sex/gender/age  of the victim. This is the exciting part because I think it will involve statistics and I would like to replace words with numbers whenever possible. The other part is some literature review of sociolinguistics and gender/sex that includes pragmatics, semiotics, linguistic frames, metaphor, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis blah blah blah. I'm pretty sure the gap in the research is about the impact on non-human predators when humans are demonized as predators.

I have some sentences about predator-prey dynamics being free of language and morality and point out the many types of ecological relationships left out of the metaphor--what about scavenging? commensalism? mutualism? parasitism?  My bigger claim is probably along the lines of dehumanizing perpetrators, further silencing victims, the power and limitations of framing crime in this metaphor bla bla bla. What I really want to argue is that it's stupid, dumb, and wrong to co-opt the "vitality of the the struggle" (i.e.: the life-affirming, complexity, nuance, necessity of predator-prey dynamics) and label it as deviant, violent, immoral. What better evidence than representatives of the order carnivora--canididae and felidae--eating a previously frozen raw organic Cornish game hen on the living room floor? That troubles the metaphor. I think I'll make a visual argument.