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We examined two assumptions of the "Conceptual Metaphor Theory" (CMT) using corpus-based method. According to the first assumption, linguistic metaphors are merely reflections of conceptual metaphors; so linguistic metaphors have a marginal and secondary role. According to the second assumption, conventional linguistic metaphors are systematic. A 50-milion token sample of Hamshahri collection of Persian texts was selected as the corpus of the study. All of the corpus analyses of calculating the collocations and extracting the concordances were carried out using Ant Conc corpus software. Data analysis failed to find evidence in support of the first assumption provided by CMT, but the second assumption was partially confirmed. The findings suggest that the semantic patterns of linguistic metaphors are more complex than those predicted by CMT, and language use factors play an undeniable role in shaping the semantics of metaphoric expressions.  

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The process of language change is an inseparable feature of the inherent nature of every language. This change is so slow and delicate that it will be tangible for the native speakers only after a long time and in comparison with the past. A diachronic outlook of the language is especially beneficial here. The present research seeks to examine the transition process of (negative or positive) semantic prosody of some presently neutral Persian verb compounds into connotation. To this end, different researches on semantic prosody, connotation and their transformation in different languages and especially in English are reviewed and the same trend is traced in some verb compounds in Persian. Two corpora from two different historical periods (12th century and modern Persian) of language data were compiled and the semantic prosody of seven verb compound was established in the two. The results show that the semantic prosody of some of these compounds have changed from positive to negative over time and this negative semantic prosody in some of the compounds especially mojeb shodan (cause) is changing to negative connotation.

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In this study, corpus method was used to test an assumption of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that systematic and conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions have literal meaning in the source domain. The conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and IDEAS ARE PLANTS were selected for analysis and three keywords from source domain of the metaphors were chosen and matched with their English equivalents. Hamshahri 2 collection of Farsi texts was selected as the corpus of the study. For ease of processing, one third of the corpus comprising of fifty million word tokens was randomly sampled as the working corpus. Collocates of the source-domain keywords, as realizations of fixed metaphoric expressions, were extracted using AntConc software and their concordances were examined. It was found that 1) in conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions, when source-domain keywords were used metaphorically they had collocates that rarely appeared with the same source-domain keywords used literally, and 2) source-domain keywords had gradable degrees of metaphoricity. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that the meaning of fixed metaphoric expressions may not be systematically connected to the metaphor's source-domain meaning.