DOI: https://doi.org/10.36719/2706-6185/63/29-40
Systematicity and Evidential Density in a Corpus-Based Conceptual Metaphor Dictionary of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Abdulxay Qosimov 
Abstract. Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor is systematic: a single cross-domain mapping licenses many linguistic expressions. This claim is routinely invoked in literary metaphor scholarship but rarely tested against the evidence that individual studies actually assemble. The present study reports a corpus-based conceptual metaphor dictionary of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and uses it to examine both the metaphorical architecture of the trilogy and the evidential basis on which such architectures are ordinarily claimed. Metaphorically used lexical units were identified following MIPVU and grouped into conceptual mappings, yielding 283 verified attestations distributed over 210 conceptual metaphor headwords, supplemented by a further 220 attestations from a pre-filtering dataset. Three substantive findings emerge. First, mapping direction is almost perfectly unidirectional: of 203 headwords with a classifiable source domain, 202 (99.5%) draw on a concrete domain, with a single counterexample. Second, target domains cluster heavily on inner states, with emotion and psychology accounting for 27.2% of verified attestations – almost three times the next field. Third, structural metaphors predominate (42.0%), followed by ontological metaphors and personification. A fourth finding is methodological and, we argue, the most consequential: 184 of 210 headwords (87.6%) rest on a single attestation, and only 26 are supported by two or more. A dictionary of this shape is an inventory of candidate mappings containing a small well-evidenced core, not a demonstration of systematicity across its full extent. We propose that corpus-based literary metaphor studies report evidential density as a matter of routine, and that claims of systematicity be restricted to mappings meeting a stated recurrence threshold.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor theory, MIPVU, corpus stylistics, systematicity, image schemas, unidirectionality, J. R. R. Tolkien, fantasy literature