Using verb patterns to find recurrent metaphors in corpus

In this study, we examine the possibility of finding regularities in combinations of verb patterns, and if these regularities can be used to find recurrent metaphors in discourse. As the source of the data, we used Verbario, a database of 227 Spanish verbs that were annotated with the Corpus Pattern Analysis technique (Hanks 2004, 2013). We restricted our analysis to transitive patterns in order to have identical syntactic structures and be able to focus our analysis to semantic types only. Given a verb pattern such as [[Humano]] guarda [[Objeto Físico]] ([[Human]] keeps [[Physical Object]]), the base pattern is [[Human]] ~ [[Physical Object]], a syntacto-semantic structure that can be found also in verbs other than guardar. 177 verbs from the database (78%) had 2 or more transitive structures and were included in the study. Results show how a small number of semantic types and combinations of verb patterns are linked to most of the verbs. Additionally, many pairs of base patterns are connected to each other through metaphors. The study is of interest for lexicographic tasks involving corpus analysis and is a contribution to corpus-based studies of metaphor.