ABSTRACT Drawing on insights from intercultural pragmatics and Deliberate Metaphor Theory, this study investigates the use of metaphorical expressions in English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. Research data were collected from the Asian Corpus of English, and eight orientational phrasal verbs – namely put up, get up, go down, come down, stay in, live in, come out, and check out – were selected and analyzed using the Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedures. The findings reveal that ELF speakers make extensive use of deliberate metaphors, which display linguistic creativity, intentionality, and context-dependency in intercultural communication. A detailed analysis of the corpus data indicates that ELF speakers employ various communication strategies, including repetition, clarification, paraphrasing, back-channeling, and confirmation, to negotiate the metaphorical meanings of the orientational phrasal verbs. This study provides significant insights into the construction of deliberate metaphors by ELF speakers in specific situational contexts.