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Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Metaphorical polysemy and cognitive mechanism of tactile terms

Behavioral profiling of the modern Chinese lexeme yìng ‘hard’

 | Beijing Foreign Studies University
 | Beijing Foreign Studies University
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Abstract
This study investigates the metaphorical polysemy and cognitive mechanism of tactile terms through a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese lexeme yìng (硬, ‘hard’), an area that remains less explored than visual terms among sensory vocabulary. Using a corpus-based behavioral profile methodology, 1,300 occurrences of yìng from the CCL Corpus were annotated across 41 contextual features, encompassing 118 variable levels. Hierarchical agglomerative clustering, random forest classification, and correlation analyses were employed to organize the 13 identified metaphorical senses into three coherent categories, each characterized by approximately ten salient features and their patterned co-occurrences. The findings provide an empirically grounded account of how tactile metaphors differ from visual ones in cognitive schemas (interaction-centrality vs attributes-centrality), illustrating how embodiment shape metaphorical extensions in modern Chinese.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
    • 2.1Metaphorical polysemy
    • 2.2Force dynamic schema
    • 2.3Metaphorical polysemy of yìng
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Contextual features
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Hierarchical clustering membership
    • 4.2Behavioral profile on Category 1
    • 4.3Behavioral profile on Category 2
    • 4.4Behavioral profile on Category 3
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Cognitive mechanism of tactile term yìng
    • 5.2Comparison of cognitive mechanisms
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
References (63)
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