A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Simile and Metaphor Based on a Large Scale Chinese Corpus

This paper puts forward the mapping inheritance hypothesis which states that the ultimate goal of mapping is to inherit the attributes of source domains by comparing structures ‘as A as Y’(像 Y 一样 A)and 'n n/n+n'. Furthermore, we have built a knowledge base for simile and explored the distribution of source domain and its attribute hierarchy. The study shows that the number of S domain words in Chinese simile is different from metaphor, they only have in common 155 S domain words. Although simile and metaphor both tend to choose the semantic category B_object as their source domain, simile expressions are more likely to choose plants and animals, metaphorical expressions are more likely to choose inanimate objects.