From Concordance Lines to Conceptual Mappings: A Corpus-Assisted Comparison of Perception Metaphors in English and Hausa Romance Fiction

Cross-linguistic research on conceptual metaphor requires comparable data, consistent annotation and clear reporting. These requirements become more difficult when the languages being compared have different lexical systems and unequal corpus resources. This article presents a corpus-assisted comparison of visual and auditory perception metaphors in English and Hausa romance fiction. The data come from four English novels containing 520,425 words and twelve Hausa novels containing 521,052 words. AntConc 3.5.7 was used to retrieve the English lemmas see and hear and the Hausa verbs gani and ji. A random sample of 500 citations was examined for each verb. Metaphorical uses were identified through the Metaphor Identification Procedure, while the resulting conceptual mappings were interpreted within Sweetser’s (1990) Mind-as-Body account and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The audit confirms 565 metaphorical tokens in the four samples: 260 for see, 52 for hear, 151 for gani and 102 for ji. Metaphor incidence was highest for see (52.0%), followed by gani (30.2%), ji (20.4%), and hear (10.4%). The clearest cross-linguistic contrast is that cognition is expressed through vision in the English corpus and through hearing in the Hausa corpus. The study also shows that equal corpus size does not ensure full comparability because the corpora differ in text distribution, author composition, sampling fractions, and lexical polysemy. In particular, Hausa ji requires contextual separation of hearing from feeling, taste and smell. The article therefore presents a transparent workflow that keeps corpus composition, lexical retrieval, metaphor identification, conceptual classification, translation. and reliability assessment as distinct stages.