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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:1 (2024) ► pp.1–33

Metaphorical polysemy of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black”

A corpus-based cognitive semantic analysis with Behavioral Profiles

ORCID logo | City University of Hong Kong
ORCID logo | City University of Hong Kong

This paper reports a corpus-based, cognitive semantic study on profiling the varied uses of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black” with regard to its metaphorical polysemy. We hypothesize that the semantic (dis)similarities among the eight metaphorical meanings of hēi “black” can be captured by clustering their contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. The Behavioral Profiles approach is adopted for the analyses with the annotations of 800 instances for 46 contextual features and a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis conducted on the annotated data. The results show that the eight metaphorical senses of hēi “black” fall into three clusters. This clustering can be explained by the conceptual bases pertaining to color perceptions and color changes, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the corpus-based Behavioral Profiles approach in exploring the underlying cognitive mechanisms of metaphorical extensions and meaning differentiations.

Keywords: metaphorical polysemy, basic color terms, Behavioral Profiles, cluster analysis, Mandarin Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphorical polysemy and Behavioral Profiles
    • 2.1Metaphorical polysemy of CTs
    • 2.2Metaphorical polysemy of Chinese CT hēi “black”
    • 2.3Behavioral Profiles studies on polysemy
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Introduction to contextual features (ID tags)
    • 3.3Feature annotation
  • 4.Behavioral Profiles analysis
    • 4.1General observation on cluster solution
    • 4.2Behavioral Profiles: Cluster 1 vs. Clusters 2 & 3
      • 4.2.1Overview of distinctive contextual features
      • 4.2.2Cognitive semantic analysis based on the distinctive contextual features
    • 4.3Behavioral Profiles: Cluster 2 vs. Cluster 3
      • 4.3.1Overview of distinctive contextual features
      • 4.3.2Cognitive semantic analysis based on distinctive contextual features
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21067.liu
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