Chinese Word Sketch and Mapping Principles: a Corpus-Based Study of Conceptual Metaphors Using the Building Source Domain

This study examines whether Mapping Principles, which govern how concrete concepts in a source domain are mapped to abstract concepts in a target domain, are realized in large-scale corpus data. In particular, we propose a frequency-based collocational approach to determine mapping principles based on the most productive mapping. In addition, in contrast to the target-domain-oriented method used in previous studies, we employ the source-domain-oriented method to search for lexical mappings from a particular source domain, i.e. BUILDING, to a number of target domains. The corpus data demonstrates that mapping principles exist in a source-target domain pairing. In addition, we found that different target domains select the source domain of BUILDING