Abstract：The combination of metaphor studies and corpus linguistics has been a new trend which attracts more and more attention of metaphor scholars and applied linguists. This study found that in recent years, corpus-based metaphor studies of foreign scholars fall broadly into four categories: the identification, annotation and collection of metaphors in corpus, cross-linguistic comparative study of metaphors, usage and function of metaphors in specific discourses, and establishment of metaphor data-bases.To dialectically analyze the theoretical interpretation, reliability and operability of recent corpus-based metaphor studies helps to promote the corpus methods for metaphor studies and broaden the perspectives of empirical research of metaphors.

Keyword：metaphor;corpus;research methods;dialectic analysis;