Metaphoconstructions: combining metaphors and construction

This article demonstrates a corpus-based approach to the investigation of metaphorical constructions by combining key insights from Conceptual Theory of Metaphor (Kӧvecses 2002), Blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006, Croft 2001). This approach rests on the retrieval of lexical units from the target domain and the identification of the metaphorical expressions associated with them. The author proposes to encode the conventionalized uses of symbolic units in terms of metaphorical constructions: that is, metaphoconstructions. It is argued that the meanings of individual metaphoconstructions not only reside in a set of correspondences between the two domains, but also depend on conceptual integration in a given situation of use. A corpus-based method presented in this article differs from the introspective method in that it allows us to extract metaphorical constructions more exhaustively and to quantify their frequency.