ECONOMY IS A PERSON: A Chinese-English Corpora and Ontological-based Comparison Using the Conceptual Mapping Model

This paper proposes a corpora-based approach in comparing the Mapping Principles for economy metaphors in English and Chinese. The Mapping Principles are validated using an upper ontology (SUMO). This research extends on the work of Ahrens, Chung and Huang (2003) by examining the ‘economy’ metaphors in Chinese and English. In Ahrens, Chung and Huang (2003), they proposed to delimit the Mapping Principle via two steps: First, they used a corpora-based analysis on the word jingji ‘economy’ to find out the most prototypical mappings in a metaphor Second, they used an upper ontology (SUMO) to examine whether the mapping principle is a representation of conceptual knowledge in the ontology. This paper goes a step further by examining the similarities and differences of source domains in English and Chinese. Using the Conceptual Mapping Model, this paper looks particularly into the example of ECONOMY IS A PERSON. This paper observes the representation of shared knowledge in the source domain in different languages and explains the similarities and differences by looking into the definition of inference rules in the upper ontology of SUMO.