Within cognitive linguistics,there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. A cognitive semantic inquiry can benefit considerably from looking at a broad range of authentic linguistic material contained in corpora. With the COCA corpus as the source of evidence, and the so-called lexical "carbon compounds" (lexical combinations with carbon as the core) as the object of study, this paper attempts to analyze the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor in the formation of new words and construction of new meanings. This case is used to aim at demonstrating the applicability of corpus-based methodologies in cognitive semantic analysis.