Searching for Cross-Domain Mappings in the Corpus:‎An Analysis of Conceptual Metaphors’ Usage Patterns in Farsi

In this study, corpus method was used to test an assumption of Conceptual Metaphor Theory ‎‎(CMT) that systematic and conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions have literal ‎meaning in the source domain. The conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and IDEAS ‎ARE PLANTS were selected for analysis and three keywords from source domain of the ‎metaphors were chosen and matched with their English equivalents. Hamshahri 2 collection ‎of Farsi texts was selected as the corpus of the study. For ease of processing, one third of the ‎corpus comprising of fifty million word tokens was randomly sampled as the working corpus. ‎The collocates of the source-domain keywords as realizations of fixed metaphoric expressions ‎were extracted using AntConc software and their concordances were examined. It was found ‎that 1) in conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions, when source-domain keywords were ‎used metaphorically they had collocates that rarely appeared with the same source-domain ‎keywords used literally, and 2) source-domain keywords had gradable degrees of ‎metaphoricity. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that the meanings of fixed ‎metaphoric expressions are not systematically connected to the metaphor's source-domain ‎meanings. ‎