Using collocations to establish the source domains of conceptual metaphors

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993) proposes a scenario-approach to conceptual metaphors, whereby prior knowledge of the mapped domains (target domains and source domains) is assumed to already exist before conceptual metaphors are created. However, this prior knowledge is not constrained. In this work, we instead propose that collocations can be integrated into lexical and computational methods to determine and constrain source domains. Our study uses a large sampling of corpora data and four computational steps to determine source domains. The results show that source domains can be identified through computational and criteria-based methodologies. This study will provide evidence to integrate linguistic collocations in order to test the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Our results support the use of data-driven principles to predict the cognitively motivated conceptual relation between source and target domains.