See how far we’ve come : A corpus study of the source metaphor JOURNEY

Abstract:

The present study is based on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which Lakoff and Johnson introduced in 1980. Data were taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and three phrases (a long road, bumpy road and fork in the road) were investigated, in order to see how far the conceptual metaphor theory can be corroborated using authentic data. Journey was taken as the source domain of the three phrases. After analysis it was found that altogether 79% were metaphorical tokens, 18% were literal uses and 3% ‘other’ uses of the three phrases. In the metaphorical tokens of the three phrases six conceptual metaphors were identified and the most common conceptual metaphor was LONG-TERM PURPOSEFUL (LABOURIOUS) ACTIVITIES ARE JOURNEYS which made up 63% of all metaphorical tokens. The conceptual metaphor RECOVERING FROM PHYSICAL ILLNESS (OR GRIEF) OR PHYSICAL (OR MENTAL) SUFFERING IS A JOURNEY was only found in metaphorical tokens of the phrase a long road. The study shows that CMT can be used to explain the majority of the tokens in the corpus. However, one conceptual metaphor often mentioned in previous accounts, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, turned out to be quite rare.