Corpus-based Metaphorical Studies On The Extension Of Military Combat Words

Military vocabulary has long been regarded as a separated part since most of it is coined for a specific purpose with little connection to the words in other registers. With the rapid development of technology, internet as well as the enrichment of language use, we find that, however, military vocabulary, especially combat words, widely appears in various aspects of our life. The fever of words extension even brings about their overuse to some extent since they carry metaphorical meanings and rich expressiveness.With the help of corpus retrieval system and some modern technologies, we select combat synonyms according to the word frequency. Based on the data-driven methods, we could clearly find how these military combat words perform in other registers. The paper mainly focuses on military combat words extension in the sub-sections (Sports and Economy) of Newspaper genre in The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Through the analysis of word frequencies, percentages, collocation and other key data, we make conclusions from the perspective of metaphor, social and pragmatics. Through quantitative analysis method, advantages and adverse effects of words extension are further discussed. At the end of the paper, we also predict the future development of military combat words.