Heart metaphors in Pope Francis’ speeches

Abstract

This paper, based on the theoretical background of Corpus Linguistics, Phraseology, and Cognitive Semantics, aims at analyzing, in a corpus compiled from Pope Francis’ speeches, from 2013 to 2015, the metaphorical meanings emerged from phraseologisms, especially collocations and idioms which have as node the lexical item heart. With the help of the software WordSmith Tools, a large number of high metaphorical potential combinations were extracted. This result will allow us to argue, throughout the discussions and analysis carried out, that the lexical item heart is conceived, among other things, as a repository of emotions from which a lot of conceptual metaphors may arise. Keywords: metaphor, collocations, idioms.