 Many study metaphors in a "top-down" direction, looking first at a few examples to suggest conceptual metaphors, then examining the structure of those metaphors.Researchers would look at their own lexicon, dictionaries, thesauri, and other corpus to study metaphors in language.Critics say this ignored the way language was actually used and focused too much on the hypothetical metaphors, so many irregularities were overlooked in favor of postulating universal conceptual metaphors.