Metaphodioms: connecting metaphor and idioms

Abstract

This paper aims to formulate the notion of metaphodiom and establish operational criteria for its definition by combining key insights emanating from quantitative corpus linguistics, the cognitive theory of metaphor, and a cognitive linguistic approach to idioms. To this end, the author selects boxing idioms for analysis, extracts their occurrences in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and determines their structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional properties. The paper makes a significant contribution to a growing body of literature on metaphorical idioms by systematically integrating all definitory parameters for their identification, description, and extraction from a large corpus of naturally-occurring data.