Grammatical metaphor in Chinese: A corpus based study

Abstract

This paper investigates Grammatical Metaphor (GM) in Chinese by analyzing the use of GM instances in a data set formed by 37 texts from scientific textbooks. This paper first explores the distribution of GM categories and GM syndromes in Chinese. For this aim, the GM instances in data are recognized and quantified in terms of the thirteen elemental GM categories and the seven types of GM syndromes in Chinese. This paper also investigates the impacts of contextual and developmental factors on the deployment of GM in Chinese. The relationship between GM deployment and the context of culture is explored by comparing the degree of GM in texts drawn from different genres. The effect of language development on GM deployment is detected by comparing the extent of metaphor in texts representing different levels of writing. It is found that GM distribution in Chinese is not random but determined jointly by the general tendency of GM construction and the typological properties of Chinese. Moreover, this study shows that the deployment of GM in Chinese is affected by context of culture and language development.