Conceptual Metaphors Involving “Treasure” In English

This study investigates conceptual metaphors involving the lexical item “treasure” in English within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and selected literary texts, the study analyzes a dataset of 176 metaphorical instances of the lexical item “treasure,” identified through the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007). The findings reveal systematic metaphorical mappings, including love is treasure, memory is treasure, time is treasure, and knowledge is treasure. These mappings are structured around semantic features such as value, rarity, emotional attachment, and preservation. The study argues that “treasure” constitutes a distinct value-based source domain that differs from related metaphors such as time is money by foregrounding affective rather than transactional meanings. The results contribute to cognitive linguistic research by refining our understanding of value metaphors and highlighting the role of culturally embedded schemas in shaping metaphorical conceptualization [6; 4; 9].

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