Salvador Climent* and Marta Coll-Florit All you need is love: Metaphors of love in 1946–2016 Billboard year-end number-one songs https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2019-0209 Abstract: This study examines the use of metaphors, metonymies and meta- phorical similes for love in a selective corpus of the most commercially successful US hit songs from 1946 to 2016 according to Billboard year-end charts. The analysis is performed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Our results indicate that the theme of romantic love is prevalent in US mainstream pop music over the course of seven decades but shows evolutionary features. Metaphors of love evolve from con- ventional to novel with a notable increase in both heartbreak and erotic meta- phors. Remarkably, the study finds that the two predominant conceptualizations of love in pop songs – which in a significant number of cases overlap – are the following: one experiential, originating in the physical proximity of the lovers, and one cultural, reflecting possession by one lover and showing a non-egalitarian type of love. Keywords: metaphor, pop music, conceptual metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, romantic love 1 Introduction The central theme of a large number of pop songs is some facet of romantic love. Starr and Waterman (2003: 105–110, 199–200) noted this to be already the case in the Tin Pan Alley era in the USA of the 1920s and 1930s and the trend continued through the 1940s and 1950s, when the entertainment industry grew exponen- tially: “total annual record sales in the United States rose from $191 million in 1951 to $514 million in 1959” (Starr and Waterman 2003:252). In this paper, we refer to *Corresponding author: Salvador Climent, Arts and Humanities Department, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Avinguda Tibidabo, 39-43, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, E-mail: scliment@uoc.edu Marta Coll-Florit, Arts and Humanities Department, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Avinguda Tibidabo, 39-43, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, E-mail: mcollfl@uoc.edu Text&Talk 2020; aop Open Access. © 2020 Salvador Climent and Marta Coll-Florit, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.