No abstract

Perceptual information includes sensorimotor and emotional experience regarding the multimodality of the perceptual system. The current study provides an image-based visual analysis on the embodiment of color metaphors through the investigation of (i) the perceptual (dis)similarities between the literal and metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color terms hēi ‘black’ and bái ‘white’ and (ii) the influence of emotional valence on the degree of their perceptual (dis)similarities. Specifically, 24 concepts in three semantic domains were represented as eight-dimensional vectors based on the color information extracted from online images, including two color concepts of black and white, 20 abstract concepts referring to 8 metaphorical meanings of hēi and 12 metaphorical meanings of bái, and two abstract concepts referring to positive and negative affective polarity. Statistical analyses show that (i) the literal and metaphorical meanings of hēi and bái are perceptually distinguishable given their significant perceptual (dis)similarities and (ii) the observed perceptual distinguishability cannot be solely attributed to the (in)consistency of emotional valence associated with the senses. The present study provides nonlinguistic evidence for the embodiment of color metaphors in the Chinese context with an empirical approach that can simultaneously capture the metaphorical mappings and affective associations among cross-domain concepts with sensory data.

This paper reports a corpus-based, cognitive semantic study on profiling the varied uses of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black” with regard to its metaphorical polysemy. We hypothesize that the semantic (dis)similarities among the eight metaphorical meanings of hēi “black” can be captured by clustering their contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. The Behavioral Profiles approach is adopted for the analyses with the annotations of 800 instances for 46 contextual features and a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis conducted on the annotated data. The results show that the eight metaphorical senses of hēi “black” fall into three clusters. This clustering can be explained by the conceptual bases pertaining to color perceptions and color changes, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the corpus-based Behavioral Profiles approach in exploring the underlying cognitive mechanisms of metaphorical extensions and meaning differentiations.