1. John Corbett USP-CAPES International Fellow & Visiting Professor
‘A house is not a home’: Exploring conceptual metaphors using the Historical Thesaurus of English, metaphor maps and a diachronic corpus
John Corbett
USP-CAPES International Fellow & Visiting Professor

2. an earworm
A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sittin' there,
But a chair is not a house and a house is not a home,
When there's no one there to hold you tight,
And no one there you can kiss goodnight.

3. ‘House’ & ‘home’ in the oed
House n.1
I. A building for habitation, and related senses.
1.a. A building for human habitation, typically and historically one that is the ordinary place of residence of a family.
Home 2.
2. a. A dwelling place; a person's house or abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests. Also (chiefly in later use): a private house or residence considered merely as a building; cf. house n.1
2. b. Without article or possessive. The place where one lives or was brought up, with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc., associated with it.

4. Questions...
What metaphorical relations do these two words enter into?
How did these metaphors develop over time?
What is the impact of these developments on the way the words pattern in a corpus?
A brief demonstration of how to address these questions using three online resources.

5. Three lexicographical resources
1. The Historical Thesaurus of English
2. The Mapping Metaphors project
3. The Hansard Corpus

6. Professor Michael Samuels
Address to The Philological Society (1965).
From Linguistic Evolution (1972: 180):
We will not be able to account properly for semantic change ‘[…] until it is possible to study simultaneously all the forms involved in a complex series of semantic shifts and replacements. The required data exist in multivolume historical dictionaries like the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] but they cannot be utilised because the presentation is alphabetical, not notional. The need is for a historical thesaurus which will bring together under single heads all the words, current or obsolete (and all the obsolete meanings of words still current) that have ever been used to express single and related notions.

7. From
Each sense of every word in multivolume historical dictionaries of Old, Middle and Present-Day English was recorded on pink slips and sorted into piles that were edited according to a set of semantic or ‘notional’ categories.
The process took 44 years 9 months and 1 week to complete.

8. Htoed: Historical lexicography meets cognitive linguistics
In cognitive linguistics, basic level categories are the level at which people normally conceptualise and name the world.
The HTOED is based on folk taxonomies, ie ‘common sense classifications’ which are classifications grounded on perceptions and the everyday priorities of language users, not expert/scientific classifications.
While the HTOED taxonomies are not categories of an individual mind they can be thought of as common sense categories of ‘the collective mind of English users’ understood as a speech community developing over time.

9. HTOED categories: ‘a folk taxonomy’
Almost 250,000 concepts
The three primary divisions of the Thesaurus are the External World, the Mental World, and the Social World. These in turn are divided into 377 major categories, such as Food, Thought, or War. Each category is therefore given a nested reference code, or hierarchy number, such as “ n.” for the category Whisky. Each new set of two digits indicates another level of depth in the hierarchy, from n. Intoxicating liquor all the way upwards to 01 n. The world.
HTOED website:

10. using the htoed: top-level categories
First level
01 The world
02 The mind
03 Society
Second level
01.01 The earth
02.01 Mental capacity
03.01 Society & the community
01.02 Life
02.02 Attention & judgement
03.02 Inhabiting & dwelling
01.03 Health and disease
02.03 Goodness & badness
03.03 Armed hostility
01.04 People
02.04 Emotion
03.04 Authority
01.05 Animals
02.05 Will
03.05 Law
01.06 Plants
02.06 Possession
03.06 Morality
01.07 Food and drink
02.07 Language
03.07 Education
01.08 Textiles and clothing
03.08 Faith
01.09 Physical sensation
03.09 Communication
01.10 Matter
03.10 Travel & travelling
01.11 Existence & causation
03.11 Occupation and work
01.12 Space
03.12 Trade and finance
01.13 Time
03.13 Leisure
01.14 Movement
01.15 Action
01.16 Relative properties
01.17 The supernatural

11. Using the htoed online: Browse or search

12. House and home: lists of synonyms
(n.) A house In The Historical Thesaurus of English, version Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 19 October 2018, from
|03 (n.) Dwelling-place/abode :: home In The Historical Thesaurus of English, version Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 19 October 2018, from

13. Jumping HTOED categories: ‘home’

14. One Child of the HTOED Using the HTOED to map metaphor historically

15. The mapping metaphor team
Established after the publication of the HTOED.
Use computer and manual sorting to track when words change categories.
Use the information to provide a visual conceptual map of the growth and development of metaphor in English.

16. Categories associated with ‘house’ & ‘home’

17. One example of a metaphor of ‘house’

18. One example of a metaphor of ‘home’

19. Metaphor in action: the hansard corpus
More than 1.6 billion words of text, in more than 7,600,000 speeches from nearly 40,000 individual speakers in the British Parliament from
You can search for words, phrases, collocates), and grammatical constructions. You can also search the corpus "semantically", when you want to find all words with a particular meaning.
The corpus was created as part of the SAMUELS project (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches),

20. Semantic coding in the hansard corpus

21. Semantic coding in the hansard corpus

22. Searching for collocates of ‘house’ in the domain of trade & finance

23. Results: collocates of ‘house’ in this domain

24. Semantic coding of ‘home’ in the hansard corpus

25. Searching for collocates of ‘home’ in the domain of physical sensation

26. Results: collocates of ‘home’ in the domain of physical sensation

27. Conclusion: houses are indeed not homes
The HTOED allows us to look at the relation of lexical items to others in their semantic field over time.
Mapping Metaphors allows us to track the development of entire semantic fields over time.
The Hansard Corpus allows us to look at how lexical items coded in their semantic fields behave in the contexts of UK parliamentary speeches over two centuries.
‘House’ relates to other buildings/abodes but by the late 16th century it spreads to the domain of trade and finance, and collocates with words like ‘trade, manufacturing’.
‘Home’ relates to other buildings/abodes but by the early 16th century it spreads to the domain of physical sensation and collocates with words like ‘comfort, sleep’.

28. Thank you!