Frittering away the day : Creating an inventory of metaphorical collocations in English

Collocations, words that habitually go together, such as “to book a meeting”, represent a peculiar linguistic phenomenon that has resulted in numerous studies by linguists and applied linguists, especially those in search of the mechanisms of words forming a companionship and of the effective techniques of teaching and learning collocations in another language. Recently, a new avenue of research has emerged with the aim of exploring metaphorical collocations viewed as “a type of a collocation in which the collocate is used figuratively and the base literally” (Patekar 2022), such as “a big day”. There are a number of challenges when it comes to identifying and analyzing metaphorical collocations. Hence, the aim of this paper is to outline the steps and issues in creating an inventory of metaphorical collocations in English. Using a corpus-driven approach, collocations with the noun “day” as the base were extracted automatically, and metaphorical collocations were identified and analyzed manually. The results highlight the challenges in identifying and analyzing metaphorical collocations and outline the steps in creating an inventory of metaphorical collocations. Furthermore, distinguishing collocations from free combinations on the one hand and idioms on the other remains an ongoing challenge in linguistics, which also applies to metaphorical collocations. This has several implications. Firstly, without a better corpus analysis tool, research is bound to rely on manual analysis with all its drawbacks. Secondly, creating an inventory has proven to be the first step in shedding light on metaphorical collocations. Thirdly, an inventory based on the most frequent nouns across different languages is the foundation for further cross-linguistic study of metaphorical collocations.