A Survey of Body Part Construction Metaphors in the Neo-Assyrian Letter Corpus

The dataset consists of approximately 2,400 examples of metaphors in Akkadian of what we term Body Part Constructions (BPCs) within the letter sub-corpus of the State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo). The dataset was generated by a multi-step process involving the training and application of a language model to the SAAo letter sub-corpus, converting the resulting annotations to linked open data format amenable to searching for BPCs, and manually adding metalinguistic data to the search results; these files, in CONLLU and TTL formats, are also made available in this publication. The BPC dataset is stored as a CSV file, and can serve as an easy starting place for other scholars interested in finding socio-linguistic usage patterns of this construction.