1. Introduction
Fire represents a distinctive natural phenomenon that has been integral to human daily life since its mastery by early humans. It serves utilitarian functions such as providing heat and light, yet it can also result in harmful and painful experiences. The human relationship with fire has significantly shaped our comprehension across various domains (Charteris-Black, Reference Charteris-Black2017). It functions as a potent metaphor in linguistics, acts as a symbolic mediator in psychological contexts and facilitates the dissemination of cultural practices and knowledge within sociological frameworks.
Previous studies have found that fire metaphors are employed across a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology and sociology. These metaphors serve to convey complex ideas and emotions, making them a versatile and powerful tool in academic and public discourse. Lakoff (Reference Lakoff1987) and Yu (Reference Yu1995) highlight the use of fire as a metaphor to express anger, capturing its cause, intensity and consequences in both English and Chinese contexts. Charteris-Black (Reference Charteris-Black2017) broadened this metaphorical framework, suggesting that fire can represent the intensity of various emotions and its connection to physical pain, thus extending the ‘EMOTION IS FIRE’ conceptualisation. Diken (Reference Diken2011) conceptualises fire as a paradoxical metaphor, simultaneously signifying immobility and transformation: it halts movement and suspends time while also destroying existing structures to facilitate renewal. Building on the symbolic effect of fire on social change, Hart (Reference Hart2018) employs experimental methods to show that fire metaphors influence public perceptions of police responses to civil unrest by evoking specific mental imagery. Semino (Reference Semino2021) further illustrates the effectiveness of fire metaphors in conveying the urgency and danger of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that they are less likely to provoke negative emotions in the audience compared to other metaphors usually used for describing negative news. However, these studies predominantly analyse specific instances or areas, often focusing on metaphorical language in isolation from real-world interactions. Many of these studies do not adequately investigate how direct, embodied experiences with the physical phenomenon of fire influence the development and usage of fire metaphors across various contexts. Therefore, it is of significant value to conduct research that examines how ecological cognition impacts the use of metaphorical language.
Studying fire metaphors from an ecological perspective, based on the natural attributes of fire, may yield fresh insights, aligning with the latest trends in metaphor research. Scholars employing an ecological perspective examine cognitive processes and conceptualise metaphors as cognitive phenomena that emerge from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment (Jensen & Greve, Reference Jensen and Greve2019). This approach emphasises the reciprocal relationship between the organism and its environment, as metaphorical meaning is not directly present in the mind but is discovered through physical activity and adaptation to specific goals and the real-world ecology (Gibbs, Reference Gibbs2006, Reference Gibbs2019). Metaphorical language is thus seen as a natural extension of perceiving and acting in the environment (Read & Szokolszky, Reference Read and Szokolszky2016). Research on fire in traditional Chinese medicine indicates that the cognition of ‘fire in the body’ stems from the experience of natural fire, and the mechanism of ‘fire-related therapy’ such as ironing, warm acupuncture and fire needle comes from the characteristics of natural fire, such as warmth, transformation and destruction (Liu & Jia, Reference Liu and Jia2013; Zhang & Jia, Reference Zhang and Jia2017). Corpus linguistic analyses have shown that metaphorical language is deeply connected to speakers’ encyclopaedic knowledge and perceptions of real-world objects (Johansson Falck, Reference Johansson Falck2018; Johansson Falck & Gibbs, Reference Johansson Falck and Gibbs2012). For instance, Johansson Falck (Reference Johansson Falck2018) introduced the concept of lexico-encyclopaedic conceptual metaphors, which involve the speaker’s specific understanding of target concepts in metaphorical language. In this way, metaphorical meaning is grounded in experiential affordances that can be immediately perceived or felt in the environment. Integrating the concept of affordance into metaphor studies offers a new possibility for understanding metaphoricity, allowing it to be perceived directly within the environment (Jensen & Greve, Reference Jensen and Greve2019).
Ecological affordances (hereafter known as affordances), according to Gibson, are what the environment ‘offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ (Gibson, Reference Gibson2015, p. 119). In particular, affordances about fire are directly elaborated by Gibson as follows:
A fire affords warmth even in the open but especially in a shelter. It provides illumination and, in the form of a torch, can be carried about, even into the depths of a cave. But a fire also affords injury to the skin. Like the brink of a cliff, one cannot get too close.
Following Gibson’s elaboration, warmth, illumination and injury to the skin (hereafter referred to as injury) are considered affordances that are directly perceived in the environment of fire. Besides, fire’s affordances could extend beyond the immediate perceptual features of warmth, illumination and injury. As Gibson (Reference Gibson2015) himself further elaborates, once humans learned to control fire, they unlocked additional benefits such as cooking food and smelting metal, which are not directly related to the basic perceptual experiences of fire. Affordances come from the organism–environment interaction, not only existing within the interaction between humans and their environment but also providing a profound foundation for individual cognition and linguistic expression. In metaphor studies, we can view affordances as potential meanings stimulated by the environment in human cognition. This potential meaning not only arises from perceptual experiences in the physical environment but also depends on how humans act with specific environments. Metaphorical expressions are abstract transformations of these perceptual experiences, serving as linguistic mappings of affordances. In the construction of metaphors, affordances also provide a basic cognitive framework. For example, one of the affordances of fire is warmth, which not only influences an individual’s bodily perception but also, through metaphor, transforms into expressions of abstract concepts such as emotion and comfort. They not only reveal the coupling relationship between humans and their environment but also, through language, demonstrate the deep cognitive patterns that arise from this relationship (Gallagher, Reference Gallagher2017; Jensen & Greve, Reference Jensen and Greve2019).
We posit that metaphorical expressions involving fire are inherently linked to speakers’ real-world experiences with this natural element. Thus, this study intends to investigate the use of fire metaphors within the extensively referenced Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, 2023), adopting an ecological cognitive framework, specifically focusing on the concept of affordances. To be specific, the study attempts to address the following questions:
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(1) What is the distribution pattern of metaphorical and literal fire usages in the corpus?
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(2) How does the affordance affect both the metaphorical and literal use of ‘fire’?
2. Methods
This study employs a corpus-linguistic approach to analyse the metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of the lexical item fire in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, Reference Davies2008), retrieved in September 2023. The methodology consists of three main steps: (1) collocate selection and corpus sampling, (2) metaphor identification and (3) affordance analysis.
2.1. Step 1: Collocate selection and corpus sampling
A custom sub-corpus was compiled based on the 60 most frequent collocations involving the lexical item fire, based on raw frequency. To capture meaningful co-occurrence patterns and determine typical contexts, two sets of collocations were extracted based on high-frequency collocates:
Left collocates (fire 40): the 30 most frequent collocates occurring within a four-word span to the left of fire, with no words to the right.
Right collocates (fire 04): the 30 most frequent collocates occurring within a four-word span to the right of fire, with no words to the left.
After removing irrelevant instances (e.g., Fire HD referring to a tablet and fire ants), 58 valid collocates remained (30 left, 28 right). For each collocate, 100 concordance lines were randomly sampled, yielding a data set of 5,800 instances. Only collocates with over 100 occurrences in COCA were retained to ensure statistical reliability. Both noun and verb forms of fire were included to capture grammatical variation and semantic breadth, particularly in metaphorical usage.
2.2. Step 2: Metaphor identification
Metaphorical uses of fire were identified using a modified version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) proposed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007), adapted in line with Johansson Falck’s (Reference Johansson Falck2018) usage-based, ecological approach. The original MIP focuses on the identification of metaphor by contrasting a word’s contextual meaning with its more basic, dictionary-defined meaning. This semantic contrast serves as the foundation for determining whether a given usage is metaphorical (i.e., diverging from the basic meaning) or literal. In this process, dictionary definitions of fire from Webster’s Dictionary (2006) were used as a comparative interpretive framework to guide the initial identification of metaphors within six semantic domains:
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(1) Combustion phenomena and control (e.g., the phenomenon of combustion, fuel in a state of combustion, applying fire).
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(2) Disaster/dangerous events (e.g., destructive burning, death by fire).
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(3) Operation/processing (e.g., starting operation, processing by heat).
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(4) Conflict/weapon attacks (e.g., firing of weapons, cause to explode).
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(5) Emotional/evaluation (e.g., enthusiasm, intense verbal attack or criticism).
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(6) Termination/exclusion (e.g., dismissal from a position, drive out).
It’s likely that the first three categories reflect literal meanings, while the latter three are more likely to involve metaphorical extensions, associating fire with violence, emotional intensity, or social outcomes. However, while dictionaries offer static lexical inventories, they do not explain why certain uses of fire are consistently metaphorical, while others remain literal. To address this limitation, Johansson Falck’s (Reference Johansson Falck2018) methodology was incorporated to contextualise metaphor in relation to embodied, real-world experiences of fire. The adapted identification procedure, therefore, involved the following steps:
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1. Contextual Meaning Assessment: Each occurrence of fire was interpreted within its immediate concordance context. Where ambiguity remained, the extended co-text was consulted. Each instance was also classified into six semantic categories during this step, enabling a contrast between the static dictionary senses and the actual usage patterns observed in the corpus.
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2. Metaphorical Mapping Analysis: An instance was classified as metaphorical if its contextual meaning diverged from the real-world experiences of fire (combustion) but could be conceptually understood via analogy with those properties. For example, fire as a noun may metaphorically evoke emotional states such as anger or passion, while fire as a verb may signify aggressive or abrupt action, conceptually mapping from combustion to expulsion.
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3. Blended or Scene-Based Metaphors: A subset of instances evoked real-world fire elements as part of broader metaphorical scenarios. These included idiomatic expressions (e.g., add fuel to the fire) and similes, which function metaphorically as a whole even if their constituent elements refer to physical entities. For example, in the sentence ‘The evolving situation in Egypt alone is “like drinking from a fire hose,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it last week’, the term fire hose draws upon the imagery of high-pressure water used to extinguish fire, but metaphorically frames the overwhelming and urgent nature of political messaging. Here, fire operates indirectly – anchoring the scene while facilitating metaphorical interpretation.
To ensure the reliability of metaphor annotation in this study, we adopted a procedure modelled on Reijnierse et al. (Reference Reijnierse, Burgers, Krennmayr and Steen2019), who employed a similar approach in their investigation of deliberate metaphor. Specifically, 600 instances (accounting for over 10% of the total data set) were randomly sampled from the data set and independently annotated by two coders (the first and second authors), both of whom had received systematic training in metaphor theory and the application of the MIP protocol. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using Cohen’s Kappa, which yielded a value of 0.983 (p < .001), indicating almost perfect agreement according to the classification criteria proposed by Landis and Koch (Reference Landis and Koch1977). Based on this high level of agreement, the first author proceeded to annotate the remaining instances in the data set.
2.3. Step 3: Affordance analysis
Drawing on Gibson’s (Reference Gibson2015) theory of affordances, the final step assessed whether metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of fire evoked functional attributes of real-world fire. Three affordance categories were operationalised: injury, warmth and illumination.
Each instance in the corpus was independently coded by two trained analysts for the presence (explicit or implied) of these affordances. Discrepancies were resolved through discussion to ensure intersubjective reliability. This analysis aimed to determine whether metaphorical uses of fire preferentially draw on specific embodied affordances, thereby supporting the view that metaphor is grounded in ecological perception and interaction with the physical environment.
3. Results
3.1. Overview of fire LEFT/RIGHT collocates in COCA
Table 1 shows the 30 most frequent fire LEFT collocates in COCA, and Table 2 shows the 30 most frequent fire RIGHT collocates. The second to fifth columns in Tables 1 and 2 show the collocates of the term fire, the frequency of these collocations within COCA, the Mutual Information (MI) scores for each collocation, the frequency of extracted instances, and the frequency of analysed instances, respectively. The Mutual Information (MI) score quantifies the frequency of two collocates (e.g., fire and department) appearing together within a collocation (Church & Hanks, Reference Church and Hanks1990). A score surpassing 3 denotes a significant frequency of co-occurrence, whereas a score approximating zero signifies an infrequent or rare collocation, as noted by Liu (Reference Liu2013). All the ‘fire’ collocates listed in the tables boast an MI score exceeding 3, indicating a strong and recurrent association with the term ‘fire’.
Fire LEFT collocates in COCA
Note: ‘r’ represents the random selection of corpus.
Fire RIGHT collocates in COCA
Note: ‘r’ represents the random selection of corpus.
The number of fire LEFT collocates (28,100 instances) is relatively larger than that of fire RIGHT collocates (20,293 instances). Both the top 30 most frequent fire LEFT and fire RIGHT collocates occur frequently, each exceeding 100 occurrences in COCA. The last column shows the number of remaining instances for further analysis because not all fire instances evoke the concept of a metaphorical or non-metaphorical fire. Some excluded examples are all fire HD instances (which refer to ‘fire HD’, the name of a tablet computer produced by Amazon) and all fire ants instances (which refer to ‘fire ants’, the name of an insect). Other instances are excluded as well, for example, the majority of the fire ice instances, some fire catching instances and a few fire ring instances. Fire ice and fire catching instances are, respectively, related to a series of fictional novels A Song of Ice and Fire and the film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Three instances of ‘fire ring’ refer to a songs name, making it difficult to categorise them as metaphorical or non-metaphorical without the full context.
3.2. Overview of usage patterns of metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire collocations
Tables 3 and 4 show the distribution of metaphoricity (the state of being metaphorical or not), affordances (injury, warmth and illumination) and nominal fire instances of fire LEFT and RIGHT collocations. We find that fire LEFT instances are more inclined to be used metaphorically than fire RIGHT instances. Twelve out of thirty fire LEFT instances with collocates (under, opened, hold, cease, friendly, fuel, rocket, enemy, gun, heavy, artillery, sniper) are mainly metaphorical. In contrast, only two out of twenty-eight of fire RIGHT instances with collocates (fire and brimstone) are mainly metaphorical.
Metaphoricity, affordances and nominal fire instances in fire LEFT collocations
Metaphoricity, affordances and nominal fire instances in fire RIGHT collocations
Abbreviation: NA = Not available.
All metaphorical fire LEFT instances tend to focus on the affordances of real-world fire in the context. However, the focus on affordance is not limited to metaphorical instances. In some non-metaphorical fire collocations, affordances are also emphasised as part of the contexts, especially collates lit and burning, burned and burn. Fire collocations with non-metaphorical instances which do not evoke the affordances of real-world fire can be seen from one out of fifteen fire LEFT collocations and six out of fifteen fire RIGHT collocations. The portion of nouns and verbs in fire collocations suggests that fire is more often the agent and the entity being acted upon and is less frequently used as action. This section offers a preliminary overview of the usage patterns of fire-related collocations, with more comprehensive details to be discussed in the following sections.
3.3. Affordance analysis of metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire LEFT collocations
Table 5 shows the ratio of affordances to metaphoricity and the proportion of three affordances of real-world fire in twenty-eight fire LEFT collocations. Two collocations (fire kindle and fire firefighter) without metaphorical instances are excluded. The shade of the colour was used to highlight the proportions of the three affordances, and the darker the colour, the higher the proportion.
Proportions of metaphorical collocations evoking affordances and the proportions of affordances in the metaphorical fire LEFT collocations
Overall, the results confirm that affordance is more frequently evoked in metaphorical instances. Specifically, 1364 instances evoke the affordances of real-world fire in fire LEFT collocations. Metaphorical usages account for 50.28% (1446/2876) of the data, of which 89.70% (1,297/1446) evoke affordances of real-world fire. The proportion of non-metaphorical collocations is 49.72% (1430/2876) in fire LEFT collocations among which those that evoke the affordance of real-world fire only account for 4.69% (67/1430). Additionally, among the three affordances, injury is the most frequently evoked (95.45%), followed by warmth (2.79%) and finally illumination (1.76%).
Figure 1 visualised the semantic category distribution of metaphorical fire-LEFT collocation instances and the affordances they evoke. To compare dictionary-based senses with corpus evidence and to examine how fire is metaphorically extended through affordances and contextual grounding, we categorise six senses of fire in metaphorical instances, derived from Webster’s (2006) dictionary definitions: (1) the phenomenon of combustion (307/1446), (2) the firing of weapons (986/1446), (3) intense verbal attack (79/1446), (4) start operation (3/1446), (5) dismissal from a position (9/1446) and (6) explosion (62/1446).
Proportions of metaphor types and affordance distribution in metaphorical fire LEFT collocations.
From an affordance perspective, INJ (injury) emerges as the most frequently evoked affordance across metaphorical uses of fire. It appears in five out of six semantic categories with the exception of start operation and is particularly prevalent within the firing of weapons category. In this context, fire metaphorically conveys aggression or harm, as reflected in collocates such as ‘gun’, ‘rocket’, ‘enemy’, and ‘sniper’. In contrast, WARM (warmth) and ILL (illumination) are less frequently evoked and are confined solely to the firing of weapons category. WARM is associated with collocates like ‘fuel’, ‘lit’, and ‘ice’, where metaphorical warmth may suggest activation or energy. ILL, however, is linked to only four collocates – ‘set’, ‘fire’, ‘caught’ and ‘light’ – indicating a more limited role in metaphorical extensions of fire.
From the perspective of semantic category, each collocation typically involves one type of fire metaphors. The first type of fire collocations that refer to ‘phenomenon of combustion’ includes all instances in the collocates set, light, catch, setting, forest, fuel, lit, ice, wood, and destroyed. It also includes the majority of instances for ring (36/37 instances) and catching (13/14 insances), four instances each for fire and caught (4/6 instances), two instances of smoke (2/3 instances) and one instance of cease. In these instances, fire metaphorically represents an impetus for immediate action, a symbol of transformation, rapid popularity, emotional state, an inspiration, a tricky problem, conflict, or a difficult situation. Most of them evoke the injury, warmth and illumination from the perspective of affordance. For example, in sentence 1, fire is metaphorically employed to convey the intensity of the father’s disdain. Fire’s affordance – injury is drawn on to emphasise the emotional harm that the father’s glare is intended to cause.
In sentence 2, ‘fire’ is metaphorically described as the intense, passionate feelings the man experiences towards an image reminiscent of a goddess. Warmth is metaphorically mapped into the physiological and emotional experience of attraction and desire. Just as fire provides physical warmth in the real world, the metaphorical ‘fire’ suggests that the man’s blood is ‘heated’ by passion, representing an internal, visceral reaction to the goddess. This metaphor illustrates how the affordance of fire – warmth – can be used to describe the warmth of human emotions, making the intensity of passion more palpable and vivid. It also links ecological experiences to emotional and physiological states, grounding abstract feelings in tangible, sensory experiences.
In sentence 3, fire metaphorically symbolises a sudden surge of idea or insight. It taps into fire’s affordance – illumination, as in the real world, fire provides light, enabling clarity and vision in darkness. The affordance of fire as a source of illumination provides the basis for metaphorically equating fire with enlightenment.
In the collocations mentioned above, some collocations are not related to the affordances of real-world fire. They are one forest fire, three wood fire and one destroyed fire. Fire in those collocates still refers to abstract concepts, but the affordances are not highlighted. For example, in sentence 4, the love and longing in the speaker’s chest burn wildly like a raging forest fire, fierce and uncontrollable. The metaphor of a forest fire illustrates the speaker’s intense, uncontrollable longing and love. These emotions are unstoppable and difficult to manage, leaving the speaker feeling helpless and unable to find an escape. Rather than associating this metaphor with warmth, it is more fitting to link it to the characteristics of a forest fire that spreads rapidly, covers a wide area and is difficult to extinguish. In sentence 5, ‘fire’ symbolises the undying spirit. It functions as a cultural or symbolic metaphor, where ‘fire’ stands for continuity, resilience or the ongoing power of the Council.
The second type of fire collocations that refer to ‘firing of weapons’Footnote 1 includes all metaphorical fire instances in opened and friendly, most instances in hold, cease, rocket, enemy, gun, heavy, artillery and sniper, two-thirds police instances, one-third caught instances, three out of seven fire instances and two out of seven under instances. These metaphors evoke the injury. Fire in these instances refers to bullets, missiles and weapons that are harmful to people. These weapons have the same function as real-world fire in some way to harm the human body and have sparks flashing when shooting, which also resemble real-world fire. For example, in sentence 6, ‘fire’ metaphorically used to describe the act of shooting, referring to the weapon fire in combat. As fire in the natural world is capable of causing severe harm, the destructive potential of real fire is transferred to the context of warfare, where ‘fire’ symbolises the harm inflicted by bullets and weapons.
The third type that refers to ‘intense verbal attack’ is the majority of under fire instances (69/98 instances) and a few police fire instances (1/15 instances) and heavy fire instances (9/93 instances). Under fire and heavy fire instances are typically included in phrases like under severe/critical/a lot of fire and under heavy fire, which imply that someone or an organisation is blamed or criticised (e.g., the commissioner and pro-choice community). They also evoke the injury. For example, in sentence 7, ‘fire’ symbolises the verbal or reputational attacks McMaster is facing, which can be as damaging as physical injury that fire causes. By evoking the affordance of injury, the metaphor links the physical experience of being harmed by fire to the reputational harm caused by public attacks or scrutiny.
As the fourth type, only one metaphorical rocket fire collocation refers to ‘start operating’. Here, fire is an action to start the engine. This type of fire does not evoke the affordances of the real-world fire but evokes the image of ignition inside the cylinder. When starting the engine, the electrode of the spark plug produces high-voltage volts forming the electric sparks.
The fifth type of fire collocations are metaphorical instances referring to ‘dismissal from a position’. They are one under fire instance, one police fire instance, one volunteer fire instance and one out of seven fire fire instances (6/42 instances). The previous explanation of such metaphor usually holds that a person is dismissed as quickly as a bullet is discharged from a gun, so fire can be used to mean forcing someone to leave from his/her job. However, through the interpretation of the affordances of the real-world fire, we believe that the metaphorical use of ‘fire’ here draws on the injury to highlight the negative impact of such a decision. The process of dismissal also results in emotional and financial harm to the individual affected. Unlike resignation, which is a voluntary act, dismissal usually causes painful emotions in the person being dismissed. The metaphor use of ‘fire’ taps into the experience of injury to convey the seriousness and potential damage of job termination, emphasising the harmful consequences of such an action.
The last type of metaphorical collocations that refer to ‘explosion’ is 14/42 of fire fire instances, one out of six police fire instances, one hold fire instances, two rocket fire instances, three enemy fire instances, 29/99 gun fire instances, five artillery fire instances and two sniper fire instances. In these cases, fire functions as a verb, conceptualising a rapid, aggressive action akin to shooting or attacking. This metaphor draws from the force, speed and destructive potential of literal fire, applying it to contexts like conflict and urgency. For example, in sentence 8, the permission to ‘fire away’ implies both encouragement and warning: the listener is free to speak boldly, but their words may carry consequences. This duality reflects the war/combat schema, where communication becomes a battlefield.
While most non-metaphorical fire LEFT collocations likewise refer to ‘phenomenon of combustion’, they do not primarily evoke the affordances of real-world fire, accounting for 95.03% (1359/1430). Instead, they focus on the destructiveness of fire. Houses, buildings and cities are the objects that are destroyed by fire, instead of people in the contexts. For example, in sentence 9, the lighter ignited the gasoline and the fire might burn down the house.
A small fraction of non-metaphorical fire LEFT collocations evokes the affordances of the real-world fire. The collocates include set, light, setting, and lit, which are typically used in phrases like set / light/setting / lit somebody/something on fire. Some of them are related to injury, as fire not only has the potential to hurt people but can also cause greater damage and even be lethal. For example, in sentence 10, thought ‘fire’ is not metaphorically used, it strongly evokes the injury. Fire, in this context, directly causes harm and physical pain to Megan.
A few of them highlight the warmth. For example, in sentence 11, the ‘fire’ is used in its literal sense to describe the act of creating a fire for warmth.
Compared to metaphorical uses, non-metaphorical fire-LEFT collocations evoke real-world affordances far less frequently. Out of 1,430 non-metaphorical instances, only 67 (4.69%) evoke affordances, while the vast majority (95.31%) frame fire as a destructive force acting on physical objects – particularly buildings, vehicles and landscapes. Among the non-metaphorical affordance-evoking instances, injury remains the dominant category (95.45%), followed distantly by illumination and warmth. Injury-related instances are concentrated in high-frequency collocates such as lit (16 instances), setting (6), catching (6) and set (11). These typically appear in contexts describing arson, accidents or fire outbreaks (e.g., ‘Conductive gel prevents the electrical current from setting him on fire’), emphasising fire’s capacity to physically harm humans or damage environments.
In contrast, illumination accounts for 17 instances (e.g., light [10], lit [5], wood [2]), where fire functions as a light source (e.g., ‘In the light of the fire, I could make out the predator’). These cases highlight fire’s role in enhancing visibility, particularly in darkness, underscoring its perceptual relevance in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, warmth is evoked in only 3 instances (e.g., ‘Wood fire is yellowish, warm in colour…’), portraying fire as a source of comfort rather than danger. Notably, collocates strongly associated with affordances in metaphorical usage (fire, catch, smoke, light) exhibit significantly lower affordance activation in non-metaphorical contexts. This suggests that literal references to fire often suppress its sensory qualities, whereas metaphorical uses actively recruit them for meaning construction and emotional impact. Paradoxically, literal fire appears less tied to embodied experience than metaphorical fire, which relies heavily on affordance-driven simulations.
To sum up, a majority of metaphorical fire LEFT instances connected with the affordances of real-world fire and the most outstanding is injury. Though some metaphorical fire LEFT instances do not relate to the affordances, they highlight other features of real-world fire and define abstract concepts. Although non-metaphorical fire LEFT collocations also highlight the affordances of real-world fire in the contexts, their possibility of evoking affordances is much lower than metaphorical ones. They are more concerned with fire itself as a substance than with the affordances of fire.
3.4. Affordance analysis in metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire RIGHT collocations
Table 6 shows the ratio of affordances to metaphoricity (the state of being metaphorical or not) and the proportion of three affordances in fifteen metaphorical fire RIGHT collocations. In the fire RIGHT collocations, 166 instances evoke the affordances of real-world fire. The proportion of metaphorical instances is 8.5% (238/2800) in fire RIGHT collocations among which those that evoke the affordances of real-world fire account for 57.14% (136/238). In contrast, the proportion of non-metaphorical collocations is 91.5% (2562/2800) among which those that evoke the affordance of real-world fire only account for 1.17% (31/2562). In general, metaphorical instances still evoke the affordances of real-world fire more frequently than non-metaphorical ones, which is the same as metaphorical fire LEFT collocations. Moreover, the shade of colour indicates that injury is the most prominent in the metaphorical fire RIGHT instances, except for fire burning instances, of which warmth is evoked more frequently than injury. In such cases, fire burning typically conveys passion, vitality or inner intensity, thereby suppressing the association with injury (see Sentence 12).
Proportions of metaphorical collocations evoking affordances and the proportions of affordances in the metaphorical fire RIGHT collocations
Figure 2 further supports the dominance of INJ as the primary affordance in fire-RIGHT metaphorical instances. It is especially concentrated in the phenomenon of combustion category (e.g., BRIMSTONE 74% INJ) and in cause to explode category (e.g., FIGHTERS 67% INJ). By contrast, WARMTH appears only twice, both within the phenomenon of combustion category: BURNING (44% WARM) and BURN (8% WARM). ILL (illumination) is the least frequent, occurring only once, also under phenomenon of combustion – in BURNING, where it accounts for 6% of affordance activations.
Proportions of metaphor types and affordance distribution in metaphorical fire RIGHT collocations.
Despite there being few metaphorical instances in fire RIGHT collocations, their connection with affordances is still slightly closer than non-metaphorical ones. Still, six types of fire metaphors are identified. Unlike metaphorical fire-LEFT instances, the category of ‘intense verbal attack’ is absent from fire-RIGHT metaphorical uses. Instead, a new category emerges: ‘fire protection facility’, which falls under Blended or Scene-Based Metaphors. In this type, elements of real-world fire are embedded within broader metaphorical scenarios that function metaphorically as a whole.
The majority of fire RIGHT instances belongs to ‘phenomenon of combustion’ (125/238). They include all burning, burned, brimstone, most burn (11/12), nearly half of fire (23/60) instances. Metaphorical fire instances with collocates Burning, burned and burn often evoke the notion of an abstract fire burning inside body or mind. These metaphorical uses typically emphasise warmth as the primary affordance. In such instances, an internal, non-literal fire is referenced – commonly representing emotional or psychological states such as competitive drive, passion, or love. This internal fire symbolises an affective intensity rather than a physical phenomenon. Sentence 12 metaphorically describes Hubie’s body as a furnace. In this context, ‘fire’ represents the warmth of vitality and enthusiasm that continues to burn within him despite the passage of time, and he still possesses the internal warmth or drive that fuels his actions.
Three (out of four) metaphorical fire burn instances and all metaphorical fire brimstone instances highlight the injury. In fire burn collocations, fire refers to tell-tale aches, danger and sickness. Fire brimstone collocations are typically involved in the idiom fire and brimstone, which is derived from the Bible. It can metaphorically refer to religious punishment and apocalyptic judgment, destruction in eschatology, intense rhetoric or threats, and extreme pressure or coercion. For example, in sentence 13, fire and brimstone is used metaphorically to describe the intense threat and pressure that the FBI exerted on the jury, as if it were using fire and brimstone to force them to make a decision. Fire’s affordance – injury – helps to vividly convey the magnitude and severity of this pressure.
The following four typesFootnote 2 are the same as the metaphorical fire LEFT collocations. Part of metaphorical fire RIGHT instances refers to ‘firing of weapons’ (20/238), including fire and one fighters instances. These instances usually include a noun fire and a verb (cease or open) to metaphorically describe the discharging of bullets and shells. Those refer to ‘start operating’ (41/238) are all engine, most engines, one safety, one burn and one chief instances. In each of these cases, the fire represents an action that starts the engine, regardless of the affordances of the real-world fire. Three fire and chief instances refer to ‘dismissal from a position’ (6/238). They all metaphorically describe someone being expelled. Those that refer to ‘explode’ (22/238) are 27% of fire instances (17/60), two out of seven chief instances, two out of three fighters instances and one engines instance. In the context, fire is a verb and describes the firing of artillery shells.
The collocations that refer to ‘fire protection facilities’ including one escape, one extinguisher, one fire hydrant, and 21 hose instances, but do not evoke the affordances of fire. They refer to the fire escape, fire extinguisher, fire hydrant and fire hose, respectively, but they are abstractly used in these instances. The features of fire-fighting equipment are conceptualised. Take hose fire instances as an example, it is often included the proverb drink from a fire hose , to metaphorically describe the overwhelmed state, emphasising the excess and uncontrollability of the situation. In sentence 14, the scene of drinking water from a fire hose with huge flow and pressure is compared to the changing situation in Egypt, implying the difficulty of dealing with the situation. Or it can also metaphorically describe something as a constant source (e.g., information, money and data). As shown in sentence 15, the man is signified as a fire hose, with virtue being depicted as the pouring water.
These instances do not evoke the affordances of the real-world fire, since they do not conceptualise the concept of fire but fire protection facilities. Examples like these are few, most instances are literal use and refer to the concrete fire protection facilities.
Non-metaphorical fire-RIGHT collocations evoke real-world fire affordances far less frequently than their metaphorical counterparts. Of 2,562 non-metaphorical instances, only 31 (1.17%) activate affordances, with the majority instead referring to concrete entities (e.g., fire department, fire truck) or procedural descriptions related to fire protection. This suggests such expressions typically foreground institutional or instrumental associations rather than fire’s sensory or embodied properties.
Among the 31 affordance-evoking instances, injury dominates (22 instances), followed by warmth (6) and illumination (3). Injury-related affordances primarily arise from collocates like burn (5), burned (4), burning (4), fire (2) and brimstone (7), often depicting physical harm (e.g., ‘He was on fire, burning all over’). Brimstone further extends this through destructive connotations, reinforcing fire’s perilous associations. Warmth emerges in six instances (e.g., burning [5], burn [1]), where fire serves as a literal heat source for comfort or survival (e.g., ‘Our only heat source was the fire we kept burning’). In contrast, illumination appears in just three cases (burned [2], burning [1]), referencing fire as a light source in darkness (e.g., ‘The fire had burned low… he peered into the forest’s blackness’). Despite fire’s well-known luminous function, it is minimally highlighted in literal fire-RIGHT uses.
A stark contrast exists between metaphorical and non-metaphorical patterns: 57.14% of metaphorical instances (136/238) evoke affordances, dwarfing the 1.17% (31/2562) in non-metaphorical cases. This disparity underscores metaphorical expressions’ stronger reliance on embodied fire properties for meaning construction, whereas literal uses largely suppress these qualities in favour of institutional or object-oriented references.
4. Discussion
By combining corpus analysis with qualitative research methods, we obtained three major findings for fire collocations in English. First, the number of metaphorical instances in fire LEFT collocations is much greater than that in fire RIGHT collocations. Second, the metaphorical uses of ‘fire’ tend to more strongly leverage the affordances of real-world fire compared to non-metaphorical uses in both fire LEFT and RIGHT collocations, although both are rooted in the characteristics of real-world fire. Third, among all the three affordances, injury is the most frequently highlighted one in both types of collocations.
The first finding reveals that fire LEFT collocation instances are more frequently metaphorical than fire RIGHT collocation instances. This pattern appears to be linked to the distribution of verb and noun collocates within the corpus. Specifically, there is a notable disparity in the number of verb collocates: 13 out of 30 fire-LEFT collocates are verbsFootnote 3, compared to only 5 out of 28 in fire-RIGHT collocations. As demonstrated by Gentner and Boroditsky (Reference Gentner and Boroditsky2001) and Deignan (Reference Deignan2005), verbs are particularly effective at portraying dynamic processes and relational dynamics, qualities that render them more conducive to the formation of conceptual metaphors than nouns. Within the fire LEFT collocations, ‘fire’ frequently combines with verb collocates to form verb phrases that denote actions and states. These constructions are more likely to be interpreted abstractly and more often involve affordances of real-world fire (Vigliocco et al., Reference Vigliocco, Vinson, Druks, Barber and Cappa2011). For instance, the phrase ‘set the world on fire’ literally denotes combustion but metaphorically signifies causing a profound impact. Additionally, some fire-LEFT collocations incorporate noun phrases like ‘heavy fire’ – which, despite consisting of concrete elements, are metaphorically structured around the imagery of physical fire. In such cases, ‘fire’ functions figuratively to denote intense attacks or concentrated shooting. In contrast, fire-RIGHT collocations primarily involve noun–noun constructions referring to tangible objects associated with firefighting – such as fire hydrant or fire hose. These terms typically refer to concrete entities, including equipment, roles, or personnel. While occasional metaphorical uses exist (e.g., describing a fast talker as a fire hose), such instances are rare in the current data set. Therefore, the concepts involved in fire RIGHT collocations instances are relatively more concrete and therefore less likely to be used metaphorically.
Second, metaphorical fire collocations are more likely to evoke real-world fire affordances than non-metaphorical ones, regardless of collocates’ position as LEFT or RIGHT. From an embodied cognition perspective, understanding arises through dynamic interaction with the environment rather than through abstract representation alone (Varela et al., Reference Varela, Thompson and Eleanor2017). Gibbs (Reference Gibbs2005, Reference Gibbs2019) argues that direct bodily experiences underpin both cognition and language, with metaphorical expressions being inherently embodied, enactive, embedded and extended. Central to this process are affordances – defined by Gibson (Reference Gibson2015) as the actionable possibilities arising from organism–environment interactions – which serve as the basis for conceptualisation. These affordances, derived from perceptual and physical engagement with natural phenomena, tend to be more salient, familiar and memorable. In the case of fire, its extreme danger to early humans – particularly its capacity to cause bodily harm – likely heightened cognitive sensitivity to the affordance of ‘injury to the skin’, making it especially prominent in metaphorical projection. Corpus data from Johansson Falck (Reference Johansson Falck2018) also suggest that metaphorical language tends to highlight only those source-domain elements that speakers can directly imagine, while non-metaphorical language may capture both salient and non-salient features of real-world entities. This aligns with Gibson’s (Reference Gibson2015) view that individuals cannot extract insights from imagined objects they have never experienced.
Our findings support Johansson’s claim, as the metaphorical use of fire similarly centres on its most salient affordances. However, a notable difference emerges: Johansson found that bridge 04 (RIGHT collocations) are more metaphorical than bridge 40 (LEFT collocations), whereas our results indicate the opposite pattern for fire. This discrepancy may stem from two factors. First, bridge often functions as a subject or predicate (e.g., ‘a bridge connects’), while fire typically relies on collocates to form a phrase. Second, bridge, as a human-made artefact, and fire, as a natural phenomenon, elicit different forms of perception and interaction. Despite this variation, both studies underscore that metaphorical language draws heavily on the affordances of real-world entities. From an ecological perspective, this reinforces the role of organism–environment interaction in shaping metaphor, with salient affordances serving as key anchors for metaphorical projection – whether the entity is an artefact or a natural element. Moreover, the substantial difference between metaphorical and non-metaphorical fire collocations involving real-world affordances (84.1% versus 2.15%) highlights a strong association between affordance salience and metaphorical usage. This suggests that in future research, affordances may function as diagnostic cues in metaphor identification: when an instance activates a core affordance, the likelihood of metaphorical interpretation increases significantly. This perspective not only enhances our understanding of the cognitive foundations of metaphor but also holds practical value for improving metaphor detection in large-scale corpus analysis.
Third, in terms of the hierarchy of evoked affordances, injury is the most prominent, followed by warmth, and illumination is the least. The results demonstrate that the prominence of these three affordances of real-world fire correspond to the interaction experiences of human ancestors with natural fire. This phenomenon can potentially be elucidated through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Initially, fire was perceived by our forebears as a perilous, volatile and uncontrollable natural force. To ensure their survival, it was imperative to avoid exposure to fires, which not only posed a significant risk of causing severe burn injuries but also presented an immediate and potentially lethal threat to their very existence. Over evolutionary time scales, this fear response became deeply embedded within our species, transmitted through generations via genetic inheritance. This mechanism shares similarities with human’s innate fear of snakes, which stems from psychobiological and evolutionary influences, as illustrated by Kawai (Reference Kawai2019). According to Littlemore (Reference Littlemore and Hampe2017), affordances that are perceptually salient, emotionally charged and physically enactable at the perception–action level are more likely to be encoded metaphorically or metonymically in language or gesture. Among the affordances of fire, injury evokes the most immediate and intense responses – such as physical recoil, pain, or fear – making it highly salient for metaphorical projection (e.g., under fire, burned by criticism). As humans gradually learned to manage fire, they began to regulate its use for their benefit, transforming it from a purely dangerous phenomenon into a functional and beneficial tool (Gibson, Reference Gibson2015). Warmth, associated with moderate approach behaviours (e.g., reaching, gathering), evokes comfort and social connection, supporting metaphors such as fire of love. In contrast, illumination elicits weaker bodily responses and lower emotional arousal, making metaphors like shed light on a topic more context-dependent and less immediately accessible. Overall, this hierarchy reflects how human’s evolving relationship with the real-world fire has shaped the way its metaphorical meanings are cognitively mapped.
A final point of note concerns the relationship between dictionary-based semantic categories and actual metaphorical usage. Webster’s Dictionary (2006) can distinguish six semantic categories for fire, separating literal meanings (e.g., combustion, starting an operation) from metaphorical extensions (e.g., firing weapons, explosions, verbal attacks, dismissal). Our corpus analysis partly echoes with these classifications. As expected, metaphorical usage is most prevalent in the ‘firing of weapons’ category (1006 out of 1660 instances). Unexpectedly, however, the ‘phenomenon of combustion’ – traditionally treated as a literal category – ranks second in metaphorical frequency (432 instances), revealing a limitation in static dictionary-based categorisation. This inconsistency arises from the cognitive principle of affordance, which refers to the perceived action potentials generated through organism–environment interactions (Gibson, Reference Gibson2015). For fire, three core affordances emerge from embodied experience: injury, warmth and illumination. Among these, injury is the most salient and frequently evoked in metaphorical contexts. Our analysis shows that the injury affordance is activated in nearly all metaphorical uses involving firing of weapons, explosions, verbal attacks and dismissals.
Notably, even in abstract domains like verbal attacks and dismissals – where the connection to physical fire may seem remote – the injury affordance remains central. This suggests that metaphor comprehension relies heavily on embodied experience, allowing users to conceptualise abstract events through physical sensations such as pain, warmth, or illumination. The divergence between dictionary definitions and metaphorical usage thus highlights a key limitation of static lexical semantics. This gap is best explained by the dynamic activation of embodied affordances in context. Future research should aim to quantify these affordance activation thresholds, offering a more predictive and cognitively grounded model of metaphor generation and interpretation.
5. Limitations and future directions
Although Gibson also mentioned that once humans master the control of fire, it can afford benefits beyond warmth, illumination and injury to the skin, he did not emphasise cooking as a core affordance in his primary description of fire’s ecological affordances. Similarly, our collected data do not include instances that explicitly reference fire’s use for cooking. This absence may be attributed to the relatively late emergence of cooking as a significant affordance of fire in human history. While early hominins began using controlled fire for warmth, protection and basic activities about two million years ago (Burton, Reference Burton2009), the use of fire for cooking likely came later, after mastering its initial functions such as warmth and illumination. This gradual shift may explain why cooking, despite being a critical application of fire, does not feature prominently in our data or in Gibson’s core ecological description. Humans have developed various fire-making technologies, such as matches, plasma lighters and piezoelectric ignition systems. This advancement has refined the function of fire, leading to the creation of diverse cooking tools and methods, reducing the emphasis on fire as the fundamental element of cooking. This evolution is mirrored in language and culture, where numerous terms precisely describe different cooking techniques and tools without fire being mentioned, such as bake, boil, roast, simmer, stove and oven. This interpretation also reminds us of one limitation of the current study in which quite a few instances of fire-related metaphor remain untouched because we have focused only on the concordance lines of ‘fire’. Future investigations will entail a more extensive selection of search terms, meticulously aligned with the intricate semantic network encompassing the notion of ‘fire’. This approach will facilitate the identification of a wider array of latent, metaphorical usages of ‘fire’ embedded in the most influential corpus of English language like COCA, serving to reinforce and corroborate the findings and insights obtained in the present study.
Besides, regarding the operationalisation of metaphoricity, we adopted a categorical approach, treating metaphoricity as a binary distinction between metaphorical and literal usage. Each instance of fire in our corpus was classified based on whether its contextual meaning diverged from embodied, real-world experiences of physical fire. While this method ensures clarity and consistency in analysis, it does not fully capture the nuanced and often gradient nature of metaphorical language. As recent studies (e.g., Julich-Warpakowski & Jensen, Reference Julich-Warpakowski and Jensen2023) emphasised, metaphoricity can also be understood as a scalar phenomenon, varying in degree according to multiple factors such as semantic distance, noticeability, conventionality and contextual activation. Adopting such a scalar view would be especially valuable in addressing the many grey zone cases within our data set – expressions that resist neat binary classification yet still participate in metaphorical mapping to varying extents. Furthermore, it remains an open and theoretically significant question how metaphoricity, conceived as a scalar property, interacts with the notion of affordances. Specifically, future research could investigate how differing levels of metaphoricity correlate with the salience or activation strength of embodied affordances (e.g., injury, warmth, illumination) in metaphorical interpretation. We, therefore, suggest that future work moves towards a more graded, context-sensitive framework for metaphoricity, potentially integrating psycholinguistic or experimental methods to quantify metaphor strength and its interaction with embodied cognition. Such an approach would allow for a more comprehensive and cognitively grounded account of metaphor use in natural language.
Moreover, while our initial focus was primarily on metaphor, post hoc reclassification of the data set revealed that a subset of expressions originally coded as metaphor (e.g., gun fire, open fire) are more accurately described as metonymic.Footnote 4 These expressions operate through contiguity-based mappings within a single experiential domain rather than invoking the cross-domain mappings characteristic of metaphor. This reclassification supports a scalar view of metaphoricity, which conceives of metaphor and metonymy not as a binary distinction but as points along a continuum. Within this continuum, metonymy occupies the lower end, where conceptual contiguity outweighs metaphorical similarity. As Barcelona (Reference Barcelona and Barcelona2000) notes, metaphoricity does not emerge abruptly but accumulates gradually along the metonymy-metaphor cline. Crucially, context can shift an expression’s position along this continuum, modulating its metaphorical strength. For instance, consider the utterance: ‘Sometimes I just want to enter the classroom with a machine gun and open fire’. Here, ‘open fire’ functions primarily metonymically (FIRE FOR GUNFIRE) within the domain of armed conflict. However, the broader context evokes a metaphorical mapping between physical violence and verbal aggression (TEACHING AS WARFARE), illustrating how a single expression can dynamically engage both metonymic and metaphorical processes depending on usage.
Our findings confirm this dynamic. Both metaphorical and metonymic fire expressions are rooted in a shared embodied schema – fire-as-danger – and occupy positions along a unified metaphoricity continuum. The consistent activation of injury affordances (see Table 7) suggests that injury constitutes the most core affordance of fire and that both metonymic reference (via contiguous physical cues) and metaphorical mapping (via domain transposition) rely on shared embodied experiences to generate meaning. In metonymic expressions (e.g., open fire, gun fire), a spark of fire evokes perceptually salient features – such as muzzle flashes or explosions – through intra-domain contiguity. These expressions tend to be more constrained, typically activating only the injury affordance. Metaphorical uses, by contrast, project the embodied experience of fire onto abstract domains such as social criticism or emotional intensity. While injury remains a dominant affordance, metaphorical expressions also engage secondary affordances like warmth and illumination, reflecting greater conceptual flexibility. These patterns support the view that both figurative strategies involve selective attention to salient environmental cues (Gibson, Reference Gibson2015). Metonymy enables efficient reference via physically grounded cues, while metaphor facilitates abstract meaning-making through cross-domain mappings. As Littlemore (Reference Littlemore2019) observes, both are deeply rooted in embodied cognition – though the grounding of metonymy may be even more immediate and fundamental in certain contexts.
Distribution of metaphors and metonymies across affordance types
Building on our findings, future research should further investigate the dynamic interplay between metaphor, metonymy and affordance perception. A particularly promising direction is the development of a more nuanced typology of metonymic affordances, which remain underexplored compared to metaphorical mappings. Experimental and corpus-based methods could also be employed to examine how affordance salience interacts with cognitive variables such as attention, memory and emotional intensity. Such research would deepen our understanding of why certain affordances – like injury in fire metaphors – tend to dominate figurative language, and how embodied experience guides the selection of salient cues in both literal and figurative expressions.
6. Conclusion
In conclusion, this study highlights the significant impact of real-world experiences with fire on the formation and understanding of fire metaphors. By employing a corpus linguistic method, we have demonstrated that both metaphorical and literal uses of ‘fire’ are intricately linked to the affordances of real-worlds fire, with the predominance of ‘injury to the skin’ over the other two affordances of ‘warmth’ and ‘illumination’, and underscore the complex interplay between embodied experiences and metaphorical interpretation. We prove that affordance of real-world entity is particularly salient in metaphorical language whether it is an artefact or natural element/phenomenon. These findings suggest that our cognition engagement with the affordances of fire not only shapes the metaphors we construct but also reflects deeper ecological interactions between humans and their environment.
Data availability statement
The raw data supporting the conclusion of this article are available at https://osf.io/m9jd3/?view_only=572b902ff6e84e44abbb0f6b34ce6966.
Author contribution
Conceptualisation, Y.L., K.C.; data curation, Y.L., S.C.; original draft preparation, Y.L., S.C., K.C.; review and editing, S.C, K.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding statement
This work was supported by Chongqing Social Science Planning Project (2023NDYB167), the Second Round Research Project of Chongqing First-class Discipline Foreign Language and Literature (SISUWYJY202305) and National Social Science Fund of China – Western Project (Grant No. 21XYY001).
Competing interest
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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