Watercourse metaphors in Polish and Russian The case of the metaphorical classifiers <i>rzeka, potok, strumień, struga</i> and  <i>reka, potok, ručej, struja</i>

This paper examines binominal constructions in Polish and Russian of the type [N1 + N2.GEN], in which N1 belongs to the semantic domain of natural watercourses. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the study aims to identify the collocational preferences and semantic specializations of the selected N1s. Particular attention is given to the salient features metaphorically mapped from the aquatic source domain of N1 onto the target domain of N2, and to the motivations behind the choice of a given classifier in context. The study shows that, while the classifier river is used similarly in both languages, other classifiers behave differently in Polish and Russian.