Abstract
This chapter attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate over Conceptual Metaphor Theory by investigating its empirical validity in language use with a corpus-based approach. Using the Bank of English (BoE), this study analyses the frequently-occurring linguistic expressions of time that are associated with two conceptual metaphors of time (TIME IS MONEY and TIME IS MOTION). The results firstly show that the Lakoffian approach of intuitive metaphor analysis raises questions, as their studies (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago, Chicago, 1980a, J Philos 77(8):453–486, 1980b) fail to mention many frequently-occurring linguistic metaphors of time and some of the linguistic examples they gave occur rarely in the BoE. Secondly, the corpus-based analysis reveals more dynamic or complicated linguistic features (e.g. collocational behaviour of certain lexical items and phraseological uses of some linguistic expressions) that cannot be entirely explained or have not been accounted for by the conceptual mapping of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Published Version
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