  Vossian Antonomasia is a prolific stylistic device, in use since antiquity.
It can compress the introduction or description of a person or another named
entity into a terse, poignant formulation and can best be explained by an
example: When Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen is described as "the
Mozart of chess", it is Vossian Antonomasia we are dealing with. The pattern is
simple: A source (Mozart) is used to describe a target (Magnus Carlsen), the
transfer of meaning is reached via a modifier ("of chess"). This phenomenon has
been discussed before (as 'metaphorical antonomasia' or, with special focus on
the source object, as 'paragons'), but no corpus-based approach has been
undertaken as yet to explore its breadth and variety. We are looking into a
full-text newspaper corpus (The New York Times, 1987-2007) and describe a new
method for the automatic extraction of Vossian Antonomasia based on Wikidata
entities. Our analysis offers new insights into the occurrence of popular
paragons and their distribution.
