Thematic role mappings in metaphor variation: contrasting English bake and Spanish hornear

Abstract

Abstract The present study investigates the scope of metaphors evoked by the culinary term bake in American English and its Peninsular Spanish equivalent hornear. The data analysed was extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects. The target frames evoked and the frame elements involved in the metaphorical mappings were used to identify and analyse the metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, the type of process and thematic roles performed by the frame elements in the conceptual projections were examined to make divergences explicit. Our results suggest that metaphor diversity is broader in American English, as the source frame evoked by bake expresses metaphorically a larger number of target frames than hornear in Peninsular Spanish. Consequently, these lexical items are not exact equivalents. Each language seems to place the experiential focus on different frame elements and thematic roles to create their metaphorical mappings, which points to differential cognitive preferences between both cultures.