In the view of cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are often understood through more concrete domains of experience, and the resulting conceptual metaphors deeply influence the way people think of and reason about them. Over the past few decades, several interesting studies have been published about this feature in the realm of politics, where the power of speech is greatly felt. One of the most basic concepts of this realm is that of the state, sometimes equated with the country people live in. This paper discusses similarities and differences in the conceptualization of the state in Chinese political discourse on one hand, and Hungarian political discourse on the other, as they are reflected in the source domains used as vehicles of understanding. The discussion is based on corpus research findings, but the analysis relies both on individual intuition of the authors, members of these two cultures (yielding quality analysis), and on frequency counts in the texts of the corpora (quantity analysis). The functions of culture in shaping metaphors and choosing a specific source domain are also taken into consideration in this contrastive study of the two languages.

The present article deals with selected property resultative constructions. They are first compared in a variety of languages in general and then in the specialised genre of cooking recipes. Unlike in English, resultatives realised as adjective phrases are either not available or very rare in some languages studied in this article (Croatian, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian), where they are most frequently replaced by prepositional phrases or some clausal structures. However, it turns out on closer inspection that adjective phrases are not only used infrequently in the specialised genre of cooking recipes in those languages that do not favour this type of resultative phrases in general, but also in English, which is surprising. We claim that the unexpected asymmetry in the formal realisation of selected property resultatives (i.e., the absence of AP resultatives in cooking recipes in English) can be motivated if we consider this phenomenon against the background of the embodiment of human language in the broadest sense of the concept.

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