Usos literales y metafóricos del sustantivo 'cabeza' y su manifestación en las unidades fraseológicas somáticas: un estudio basado en la consulta del corpus CREA
Literal and metaphoric uses of the noun cabeza and its presence in the somatic phraseological units: a study based on the consultation of the CREA corpus

Summary/Abstract: The present study is aimed at analysing the possible literal or metaphoric value of the noun cabeza in Spanish and its frequency of use in phraseological units (PUs). Furthermore, different typologies of PUs are classified depending on their grammatical function and on the possible coexistence of both literal and metaphorical interpretations. The analysis is based on a consultation of the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). In the first phase, some limitations concerning chronology, geography, and themes in the search settings are defined in order to reduce the number of possible useless examples extracted from specialised texts with a denotative character. Excluding repeated examples, the study has shown an important presence of metaphoric uses of cabeza in the corpus (89 out of the total of 276). Most of the metaphorical ones are based on the polysemic value of cabeza and in the majority of the examples extracted (71 out of 89) cabeza appears in a PU, in most cases (50 of 71) with a verbal function. The analysis developed in this study has proved a certain tendency to comprehend cabeza metaphorically, as well as the high productivity of this noun in the constitution of PUs. It has also shown that PUs with both literal and metaphorical possible interpretations are more likely to be used in a figurative sense.

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