Body metaphors in travel journalism

The paper makes use of a novel corpus-driven technique, the sem-gram, i.e. automatically retrieved strings of a blend of PoS and semantic tags, to identify phraseologies from a 4-million-word corpus of travel reports from the online edition of the British daily newspaper "The Guardian", the Guardian Travel Corpus (GTC). The analysis of the widespread semantic category containing anatomy and physiology terms among the most frequent semgrams showed this to be related to a series of metaphorical expressions based on correspondences between the source domain of the human body and the target domain of geographical features/locations, which points to the notable frequency and great productivity of the conceptual metaphor A LANDSCAPE IS A (HUMAN) BODY. The purpose of the present article, therefore, is to illustrate the sem-gram technique and analyse in detail the sem-grams containing these metaphorical expressions retrieved from the GTC.