ABSTRACT
This chapter presents evidence of semantic primings found in the datasets of the items cultivated, flame and grew. Each item has two corpora: concordance lines of metaphoric uses and concordance lines of non-metaphoric uses. These are compared and contrasted to reveal evidence of lexical primings which, help to identify when words and phrases are being used metaphorically. Thus old flame, as a single item, exhibits conventionalised behaviour as a metaphor. It was found in the cultivated analyses that pronouns played a key role in distinguishing semantically between metaphoric and non-metaphoric senses of the items. Moreover, the large majority of nouns reflect prominent semantic associations which will be returned to in the adjective/adverb analysis. There are some collocates shared with the metaphoric set of noun collocates. The most striking finding was that personal pronouns were much more characteristic of the metaphors, which also reflected the human aspect relating to cultivated as a metaphor.
