Samira Sackietey

LING 1100
November 1
st
, 2013



Pilot Research Paper Draft


1. Introduction
1.1 Topic and Research Question
Throughout the course of history, various terms have been metaphorically used to
describe and understand the concept of love. And although, in the world of conceptual
metaphor theory love has been examined and thoughtfully studied in immense detail, the
primary focus among researchers have been on the concept of romantic love. This
discussion began with researcher Zoltn Kvecses, who spoke about the concepts of love,
anger, and pride, (Kvecses 1986) along with writing an entire book on romantic love
(Kvecses 1988), displayed an ongoing the investigation and discussion of how love and
other emotions compare and share similarities with respect to conceptual metaphor theory
and their structure. So, my main goal for this research is to determine when the conceptual
metaphor, LOVE IS A UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTRY PARTS) is first documented and
also, try to examine collocates and the key words in context and see if there has been a
distinct change in word usage over a period of time.
1.2 Review
In Heli Tissaris article Metaphors we love by: on the cognitive metaphors of love
from the 15th century to the present, Tissari attempts to examine not only romantic love as
she has done previously (Tissari 1999, 2000, 2001), but also examine all types of love in
order to approach an overall meaning of love. And to do this Tissari uses corpora both
modern and historical to study the types of cognitive metaphors that one may find for the
word love. More specifically, Tissari focuses primarily on metaphors having to deal with
space and time. She also, references (Kvecses 1990: 144-159) who states that the
container metaphor is key to understanding any emotion, as reason for her focus and
starting point for the study. Tissari uses a number of corpora each which were
representative of either Early Modern English or Present-Day English the list includes,
Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, The
Freiburg update of the LOB corpus (F-LOB), and The Freiburg update of the Brown corpus
(Frown). So to start off Tissari examined the verb and noun form of love and the number of
times it appeared in each corpus, next she tried look at the adjective and verb form but
yielded no results. Later as her research progressed, some patterns were noted such as
containment metaphors were more common in Present-Day English than in Early modern
English and data also suggested that Present Day English used more concrete sources for
metaphors than in Early Modern English as well as amount being more common in Early
Modern English.
As a result, Tissari states that the data and analysis reveals both stability and change
over time with metaphors of love. Tissari also elaborates more on how the corpus method
facilitates semantic generalization or in other words, a broadening change in the use of
words such as love and sources used to describe them that will help us to better
comprehend abstract concepts such as love.
1.3 Criticism
While some findings of the study proved to be useful, I believe that more focus
should have been emphasized on how sensory domains reflected the personification of love
and also Tissari could possibly embark on a more deeper an comprehensive discussion on
the differences found among the four corpora, that explored the differences in context
historically and how perhaps the things going on in that time period may have had an
impact upon the language used.
1.4 Predictions
2. Methods
For my method of approach, I used two corpora, the first one was the Corpora of
Contemporary English that contains, 450 million words dated from 1990-2012 and the
Corpus of Historical American English that contains 400 million words dated from 1810-
2009. I used these two corpora in particular to compare the differences in any of collates
and word usage that I may have come across. Also, more importantly I used the Corpus of
Historical American English to see how far back I can detect the conceptual metaphor LOVE
IS A UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTRY PARTS). To start off I began my search in both the
Corpus of Historical American English and Corpus of Contemporary English by searching
the word love and the adjectives that usually come before the word love for both corpora.
Also to see how far back the appearance of LOVE IS A UNITY can be detected I search both
the common phrases representative of the metaphor such as, we are one, my better half
and etc.


3. Results
My results were as follows:
COHA: Frequency of My better half
Year Frequency Normalized Frequency
1870 2 .11
1880 2 .10
1890 1 .05
1900 1 .05
1920 1 .04
1930 1 .04
1950 1 .04
1960 1 .04
1980 1 .04
1990 1 .04
2000 1 .03

COCA: Frequency of my better half
Genre Frequency Normalized Frequency
Spoken 0 .00
Fiction 2 .02
Magazine 1 .01
Newspaper 1 .01
Academic 0 .00

Year Range Frequency Normalized Frequency
1990-1994 2 .02
1995-1999 0 .00
2000-2004 0 .00
2005-2009 0 .00
2010-2012 2 .04

COHA: Most frequent collocates
Adjectives Frequency
True 989
Great 509
Romantic 332



COCA : Most frequent collocates
Adjectives Frequency
True 846
Tough 333
Great 320







4. Discussions and Conclusion
From my results, it is shown that the first time the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A
UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTRY PARTS) appears based on this metaphor is around the
1870s. Also, after conducting a search using collocates, I notice a pattern of the adjectives
that come before the word love, for the historical corpus, the adjectives that come before
mostly relate to romantic love and are most frequent. For COCA, the adjectives
that come before the word love are more varied in term of love True love, Tough love
are the more frequent terms and show us how varied and abstract the word love has
become.






















5. References

Kvecses, Zoltn. 1986. Metaphors of anger, pride, and love: a lexical approach to the
structure of concepts. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.

Tissari, Heli. "Metaphors we love by: on the cognitive metaphors of love from the 15th
century to the present." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English
Studies. (2001): 217 - 242.

"Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)." Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA). http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (accessed November 3, 2013).

"Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)." Corpus of Historical American English
(COHA). http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (accessed October 30, 2013).