A corpus-based analysis of conceptual metaphors with BITE and CHEW in English and Korean

The purpose of this research is to examine conceptual metaphors with BITE and CHEW in two typologically different languages, English and Korean (BITE and CHEW in English and MWUL- ‘BITE’ and SSIP- ‘CHEW’ in Korean). There has been some research on conceptual metaphors with EAT and other words that depict general eating processes; however, little attention has been paid to conceptual metaphors with words that describe specific processes of eating events. This study first discusses key grammatical properties of BITE and CHEW and their conceptual metaphors in English and Korean based on an analysis of authentic corpus data. This study then shows that although the two verbs BITE and CHEW in each language can license some metaphors in common, overall they are more different than similar in terms of metaphor types, frequency distribution patterns, and preferred syntactic and semantic properties. This study further shows that although the pairs of the English verb and its Korean counterpart (i.e., BITE in English vs. MWUL- ‘BITE’ in Korean and CHEW in English vs. SSIP- ‘CHEW’ in Korean) can induce some conceptual metaphors in the same manner, their conceptual metaphors are also more different than similar with respect to metaphor types, frequency distribution patterns, and strong collocates. Taken together, the findings suggest that it is crucial to explore authentic uses of conceptual metaphors with specific verbs involved in eating processes in more detail across different languages, making use of attested corpus data, and that in this way we can make a significant contribution to the body of literature on conceptual metaphors.