Not all metaphorical trigger lexemes can be found through automated collocation searching. An additional obstacle to this approach is the great variability in how dense and connected the constellation of source domain triggers is within a given source domain.

Limitations of Automated Collocation Searching for Source Domain Triggers

To partially automate the identification of source domain language in a specialized corpus, researchers use collocation searching in a baseline corpus to identify source domain triggers. These triggers are lexical items that activate one or more source domains used to structure a target concept. This technique produces a list of the top collocates for each source domain label, which helps expose the metaphorical structure.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

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Many target domains, however, cannot be thoroughly investigated by searching a corpus for collocates of target lexemes because not all target language occurs near or next to source domain triggers.
Thus, the ease with which metaphorical structure can be exposed has to do with the relationship between source-domain language and the structural character of the target domain.

Instead of relying on pre-specified semantic fields in the collection of candidate metaphor triggers, I use corpus collocation patterns to gather candidate triggers.

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