Corpus-based computational frame and construction analysis of motion metaphors

This paper presents a case study on motion-related metaphors that demonstrates the viability of the MetaNet computational metaphor identification system in a corpus-based analysis of the expression of conceptual metaphor. The rich annotation that is produced by the MetaNet system supports many types of linguistic analysis, such as the examination of the relative frequencies within a corpus of the different constructional patterns of the candidate expressions, the lexemes that occur within the Source and Target slots of these constructions, and the frames evoked by these lexemes. Thus, this computational system not only facilitates the discovery of potential metaphors in large-scale corpora, it also provides the semantic annotation necessary for further linguistic analysis of the metaphors that are discovered, at different granularities.