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].

Conceptual metaphor, cognitive linguistics, treasure, metaphorical mapping

Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hicke, R. M. M., & Kristensen-McLachlan, R. D. (2024). Computational frontiers for conceptual metaphor theory. arXiv. (arxiv.org)

Kövecses, Z. (2000). Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Kövecses, Z. (2024). Cognitive metaphor (updated perspective). (Preprint / research update). (ResearchGate)

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.

Pragglejaz Group. (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1–39.

Rizzato, I. (2024). Metaphor studies: Theories, methods, approaches, and future perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1520900. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1520900 (Frontiers)

Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge University Press.

Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural linguistics. John Benjamins.

Zhao, X., & Zheng, Y. (2023). Global bibliometric analysis of conceptual metaphor research over the recent two decades. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1042121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1042121 (Frontiers)