A Bidirectional Study of Mandarin Conversation Verbs

This study proposes a corpus-based method to generate Mapping Principle of metaphors. In particular, Ahrens's (2002) Mapping Principle in the Conceptual Mapping Model (CM model) is simply based on the native speakers' intuition instead of analyzing it from huge linguistic data. In order to provide more convincing evidence to support the CM model, we adopt the corpus method to extract out the metaphorical expressions in politics from the Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus. We analyze the correspondences existing within the source-target domain pairings and generate Mapping Principle based on the salient meanings in these linguistic expressions. We adopt this method to examine the mapping principles of five metaphors: POLITICS IS BUILDING, POLITICS IS A JOURNEY, POLITICS IS A PLAY, POLITICS IS A COMPETITION and POLITICS IS SPORT. This corpus-based method can provide a more convincing way to generate Mapping Principle at the linguistic level than the original one (Ahrens 2002).