Understanding Metaphor Collocation and its Patterns

Research on collocations published in English occasionally mentions “metaphorical collocations”, yet these studies rarely offer any specific definitions for metaphorical collocations. Since metaphorical collocations are an intriguing area for investigation, this paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of the current understanding of metaphorical collocation and analyse its common patterns. The methodology involves a review of the past literature on metaphor collocation across different domains, nevertheless the review is limited to the research that were published in English language. In view of the definition of metaphorical collocation, it was found that there was no concluded definition of metaphor collocation by the researchers of the reviewed literature. Nevertheless, most of the researchers agreed that at least one of the words in the word combination should be used metaphorically, while some agreed that idiom and metonymy should also be considered as metaphorical collocation. In terms of the patterns of metaphorical collocations, it was also discovered that the most common syntactic structure of the metaphor collocations identified in the examined past literature was Adj. + N, followed by V + N, while the least common syntactic pattern is V + Adv. The findings provide a better understanding of the patterns and variations in the use of metaphorical language and the impact of context on metaphor collocation. The implications of these findings are significant for the development of teaching materials, language resources, and communication strategies that reflect the diversity and complexity of metaphorical language in different contexts.