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In:New Vistas in Research on Metaphor and Metonymy: Their contexts and interaction across discourse types and modalities
Edited by Robert Kiełtyka, Mario Brdar, Marcin Kudła and Goran Milić
[Human Cognitive Processing 82] 2027
► pp. 143–162

Chapter 5
From metonymy to metaphor

A corpus-based diachronic comparison of English and Chinese color metaphors

 | University of Glasgow
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Within studies on the interaction between metonymy and metaphor, little cross-cultural research has examined metaphors arising from metonymies. This paper compares the development of the metaphorical meaning ‘youth’ shared by green and its Chinese counterpart qing, by diachronically investigating green and qing in four historical periods of English and Chinese using historical corpora.
The results show that green and qing have the connotation of youth of plants etymologically, which develops into the metaphorical meaning ‘youth’ in a process that moves from metonymy to metaphor. The similarity is driven by potential universal patterns in metaphorical conceptualization, which motivate the same connotation (youth) of the same metonymic bases (plants) and the same metaphorical mapping. Culturally motivated patterns also work in the process.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Findings
    • 3.1Green in the metaphorical meaning ‘youth’
    • 3.2Qing in the metaphorical meaning ‘youth’
    • 3.3Comparison
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Note
  • Linguistic resources
  • References
References (31)
Linguistic resources
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