The Prevalence of Linguistic Metaphor in Everyday Language The Lexical Family of Liquid

Abstract

This investigation aims at examining the prevalence of linguistic metaphors in everyday language, combining corpus analysis with the principles of cognitive semantics. According to cognitivists, linguistic metaphors are ubiquitous in general language and present a range of characteristic and systematic features. Many metaphors are rooted in language to such extent that speakers no longer perceive them as innovative structures (“fossilized” or “lexicalized” metaphors according to the terminology proposed by Larson and Rabadan, apud Samaniego Fernández 1998, respectively). This article will analyse a variety of contexts of use of terms belonging to the word family of líquido (líquido, liquidez, liquidación) retrived from CORPES (El Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI), with a view to detecting the presence or absence of a conceptual metaphor, using the guidelines for the identification of metaphor categories, as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff and Turner (1989), Talmy (2000), Neagu (2005). Terms belonging to the word family of líquido are included in the semantic field of water, a natural element that acts as source domain for numerous metaphors –orientational metaphors, movement metaphors, quantity metaphors, source metaphors, ontological metaphors, etc.– in various natural languages (Esager 2011, Naicker 2017, Duță 2017).