A Corpus Linguistics Analysis of Food Metaphors “Eat Up” and “Consume” through the Lenses of Conceptual Metaphor and Lexical Priming Theories
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Abstract
Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas “consume” and “eat up.” These words were searched for in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. One hundred instances of each grammatical form of “consume” and “eat up” were analyzed, using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and Lexical Priming tTheory (Hoey, 2005). The results indicate that 16 target domains are conceptualized using both words, with some target domains being exclusive to each word. Analyses of collocations, semantic preferences, and semantic prosody reveal that these two words have different connotations. This research casts light on food metaphors, how they are used for conceptualization, and the collocations that distinguish metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses, as well as the meanings of “eat up” and “consume.”
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