The Mapping Principles and Conceptual Metaphors: A Corpus-Based Study on the IDEA Metaphors

This study aims to examine how metaphors are used in corpus data and what mapping theory can account for the distribution of metaphor patterns realized in corpus data. In this study, we select the IDEA metaphors to explore this issue. It is hypothesized that the Conceptual Mapping Model can correctly predict the corpus data for the IDEA metaphors. We expect that metaphors relating to mapping principles (i.e. MPs) involve more frequently than those not relating to mapping principles in corpus data. We used Chinese Word Sketch and Academia Sinica Bilingual Ontological Wordnet to determine Mandarin metaphorical expressions using the target domain of IDEA via the frequency-based collocational method (Gong et al. 2008). The results demonstrate that the tokens of MP-related metaphors are more frequently than those of MP-unrelated metaphors in corpus data. In addition, we found that a target domain selects different source domains for distinct reasons. For example, the target domain of IDEA selects the source domain of BUILDING in order to utilize the notion of structure, while it selects COMMODITY for another reason, i.e. the notion of promotion. Our results are consistent with the prediction of the Conceptual Mapping Model. This study has implications that the hypothesis of mapping principles involved in conceptual metaphors can refine Lakoff's Contemporary Theory of Metaphors for delimiting the general principles governing how concrete concepts are used to characterize the abstract concepts