Identification of Metaphorical Collocations in Different Languages – Similarities and Differences

Abstract

Metaphorical collocations are a subset of collocations in which a semantic shift has occurred in one of the components. The main goal of this paper is to describe the process of identifying metaphorical collocations in different languages – English, German and Croatian. Approaches to annotating metaphorical collocations from a list of word sketches for the three languages are presented using one of the most common nouns for all three languages – “year” for English, “Jahr" (Engl. year) for German, and “godina" (Engl. year) for Croatian. The compilation of a list of relevant grammatical relations in the identification of metaphorical collocations for each language is also described. Finally, the procedures for automatic classification of metaphorical collocations for Croatian, German and English are performed and compared.