The Emergence of Mandarin Metaphors for the Internet

Conceptual metaphors underlie many of the everyday expressions we use when describing novel technology. For example, the primary metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS establishes broad links between abstract and concrete domains of experience, thus licensing complex metaphors of “movement” and “exchange” of ideas through communication. Few empirical studies have focused on how novel conceptual metaphors emerge in everyday language. This paper reports the results of a corpus study, based on a 138-million-character sample of news reports from Mainland China, which charts the time course for the emergence of Mandarin metaphors for the Internet from 1994 to 2002