Analytical methods target the structures and functions of metaphor in order to identify and describe and sometimes evaluate metaphors as part of language use and as part of discourse events. This typically involves a form of predicate calculus, not in the logical form but in a linguistic and conceptual form. In predicate calculus, meaningful expressions are broken up into parts that function as predicates and arguments. For metaphor, some of these have to come from a source domain while others come from some target domain, and the two sets of parts are connected by some form of analogy.

Analytical methods form the methodological starting point of research on metaphor in Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Relevance Theory. They also feed into the methods for metaphor research in corpus linguistics. All of these analytical methods typically address aspects of the meaning of metaphor in a broad sense of the term, and can be seen as forms of content analysis or document analysis (as contrasted with behavioural research, which for metaphor deals with the psychological and social processes of how people deal with figurative meaning).

For DMT, analytical methods have been at the core of research. In fact, DMT arose as a result of the attempt to develop a reliable method for metaphor identification, which led to the discovery of the distinction between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor and the paradox of metaphor. It is therefore natural that DMT has now also produced a Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedure, called DMIP (Reijnierse et al., 2018). DMT now also offers a propositional method of analysis for metaphor in language use and discourse (Steen, 2023, 2024), which evolved from the attempt to formally connect metaphor in language to metaphor in thought by means of the so-called five-step method (e.g., Deignan, 2017).