Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time

Abstract

Cognitive metaphors provide a lens for understanding how societies construct and negotiate ideas, including liberty discourse. This study explores conceptual metaphors in liberty discourse by applying a scalable, corpus‑driven approach for cognitive analysis. A curated list of thematic keywords related to liberty topics is used to extract relevant sentences from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. MetaPro, a framework grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, processes these sentences to identify metaphorical mappings at scale. Embedding visualizations and frequency counts were applied to both corpora; in COHA, line graphs captured temporal shifts in metaphor usage across time, while in NOW, two‑dimensional heatmaps highlighted spatial variation across countries. Selected example phrases illustrate how metaphorical mappings extend across diverse issues and domains. Thus, metaphor distributions and shifts provide a useful empirical lens for identifying changing thematic concerns in liberty discourse, offering a scalable, cognitively grounded method for cultural analysis across time and space. This demonstrates the value of computational methods for large-scale culture research.

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