Chinese Sketch Engine and Mapping Principles: A Corpus-Based Study of Conceptual Metaphors Using the BUILDING Source Domain

The goal of this paper is to use a large-scale corpus, i.e. the Gigaword Corpus via the interface of Chinese Sketch Engine, to determine underlying reasons between source and target domain pairings for con-ceptual metaphors, called Mapping Princi-ples. In particular, we will employ a fre-quency-based collocational approach to ex-amine metaphors that use the source do-main of BUILDING in Mandarin Chinese. The corpus data demonstrates that different target domains use the source domain of BUILDING for different underlying rea-sons. Our study follows the contrastive lin-guistic analysis of conceptual metaphors proposed by the Conceptual Mapping Model and help us better understand why certain mappings exist between knowledge domains.