Linguistic metaphors are a major source of evidence for conceptual metaphors, yet re-searchers are often content to rely on intuitively derived examples. This is an oversight,because analyzing metaphors from naturally occurring data may reveal potentially sig-nificant patterns not otherwise noticed (Deignan 1999).Especially in the domain of grammar, the patterns found in naturally occurring dataare not necessarily predictable from the theoretical model. For example, it is common forliteral and metaphorical meanings of a word to be of different word classes (Deignan2005).In this study, the central lexical items from the source domains ANIMALS,MOVEMENT,PLANTS and FIRE were concordanced using a 59 million word section of the Bank of En-glish, and analyzed for differences between literal and metaphorical uses with respectto word class and syntactic patterning. The analysis confirms earlier findings that met-aphorical uses of words show differences in their grammatical behavior, or even theirword class, when compared to their literal use. In addition, it shows that metaphoricaluses of a word commonly appear in distinctive and relatively fixed syntactic patterns.These findings raise questions about the nature of metaphorical mapping, becausethey cannot be explained completely by the relatively static view of mapping that issometimes suggested in discussion of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.