A Corpus Approach to Dog Metaphors in American English

This paper looks at animal metaphors on the example of DOG metaphors in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. It examines the nominal, adjectival and verbal uses of DOG metaphors and their evaluative meanings. This paper attempts to explain how evaluation of metaphors depends on the word class and features of the source domains it elaborates on. Based on many interesting observations made in this paper, we arrive at two conclusions. First, we find the generalization that the less animate DOG metaphors are, the less positive they become since verbal DOG metaphors do not reveal positive connotations while nominal and adjectival uses do. Second, we confirm Deignan s claim that grammatical rigidness can be one of the factors that generate higher level of metaphoricity since we found that the rigid form dogged is mostly used metaphorically.