Verbs of eating and preparing food and their metaphorical extensions

The aim of this thesis is to see, through a study of the examples from The English Web Corpus (enTenTen15), what influences the number and type of metaphorical extensions of the verbs of eating and preparing food. It is argued that the basic human interactions with food are contained in two concepts: consumption and preparation. Therefore, the paper examines four food-related verbs, namely two verbs connected with food consumption, eat and swallow, and two verbs connected with food preparation, cook and stir and their metaphorical extensions. A sample of 100 sentences was chosen for each of the verbs and only the metaphorical examples were analysed. The results show that the domain of food is a productive source domain often used in the English language and the use of the verbal concepts belonging to this domain in different metaphorical mappings is motivated by folk theories about food