Metaphor is not a linguistic phenomenon relegated to flowery prose, but a universal feature of everyday speech across the world's languages. Under the guidelines of modern Metaphor Theory as developed by Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is not just a matter of language, but of cognition. That is, human thought is primarily metaphorical in nature and this is revealed through language. People understand complex and intangible phenomena (i.e. the target domain) in terms of something else (i.e. the source domain), which is usually grounded in bodily experience. Using this framework, the mind is conceptualized as a place with a portal, a machine, a computer, or a workspace. Time, analyzed using corpus data, is understood as a finite, valuable resource, which can be ordered along a line, move, and has subjective qualities. Language is conceived as a clearly delimited, modular object that has properties of a machine, tool, or biological organism. As metaphoric conceptualizations often refer back to other metaphorical conceptualizations, there is a need for some type of primitive or primary metaphors upon which others are built. Early research indicates that these might be those that are most entrenched in the human bodily experience. There is also an indication that these primary metaphors may be universal, though complex metaphors vary wildly. Empirical studies that either confirm or deny the psychological reality of metaphoric thought are scant and more research is needed in this area. The analysis of time using corpus data presented here is one such example that shows real world data is inline with scholars' intuitions.
