International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:4 (2016), 527–558. doi 10.1075/ijcl.21.4.04led issn 1384–6655 / e-issn 1569–9811 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Finding source domain triggers How corpus methodologies aid in the analysis of conceptual metaphor Jenny Lederer San Francisco State University Much recent research on fgurative language and conceptual metaphor theory derives from corpus examination, and analysts are increasingly focused on the development of quantifcational tools to reveal co-occurrence patterns indica- tive of source and target domain associations. Some mappings between source and target are transparent and appear in collocation patterns in natural language data. However, other metaphors, especially those that structure abstract pro- cesses, are more complex because the target domain is lexically divorced from the source. Using economic discourse as a case study, this paper introduces new techniques directed at the quantitative evaluation of metaphorical occurrence when target and source relationships are nonobvious. Constellations of source- domain triggers are identifed in the data and shown to disproportionately emerge in topic-specifc discourse. Keywords: conceptual metaphor, lexicalization patterns, collocation, economic discourse, political discourse 1. Introduction Tis paper addresses emerging questions born out of the intersection of research on fgurative language and corpus linguistics. With the growing accessibility of large bodies of data, the study of Conceptual Metaphor Teory (Lakof & Johnson 1980) has moved from a discipline of introspective inquiry and detailed qualita- tive analysis to a feld that embraces new quantitative and experimental methods (Gibbs 2010). Unlike one-of analogies or isolated fgurative expressions, concep- tual metaphors are systematic, structured mappings between one conceptual do- main and another (Lakof & Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2010). Linguistic expression is regularly fgurative and is ofen lexicalized and idiomatic, as in phrases like a