A Study of the Uses and Phraseology Associated with Two Common Nouns

th most frequent noun in English according to frequency lists based on the British National Corpus (Leech, et.al. 2001). Since it is unlikely that speakers (or writers) would have occasion to talk about their hands so frequently, it can be hypothesized that hand is frequent because of its use in phrases, where it may have a non-literal use. Similarly, with heart. Although health is a common general topic, we would not expect people to talk frequently about specific organs and we can surmise that the frequency of heart results from metaphorical or metonymic uses of the term. Indeed, research on the metaphorical use of language has shown that body part names are very common in phrases, where they often have a metaphorical function. Recent research in the area of phraseology has usually been based on data drawn from large corpora, and in the present study I have made use of the British National Corpus (BNC) as a data source.