This article reports research investigating instances of linguistic metaphor in contextualized corpus data. Since the issue of metaphor identification in naturally-occurring data has been reason of current debate among cognitive and applied linguists, this paper focuses particularly on the process of identification of this type of language in corpus data and proposes a combined procedure for metaphor identification. The findings inform about the presence and word class of metaphorical language in the argumentative writing of EFL university students. Implications and directions for future research are highlighted.