Variation in the (non)metonymic capital names in Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese

Abstract

This paper examines the (non)metonymic usage of capital names in news articles from Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese and shows that this phenomenon is actually more complex than might have been expected. We annotated capital names extracted from a self-built news corpus with insights from previous studies on place name metonymies in Cognitive Linguistics and identified factors that would influence their (non)metonymic usage. To quantitatively explore the data, logistic regression analysis was employed. The statistical results reveal that the variation in the (non)metonymic capital names is a result of an intricate interplay of a number of conceptual, lectal and discursive factors: (1) more metonymic capital names are found in subject than non-subject position and in political than non-political news topics; types of capital may influence their metonymic usage; (2) differences between Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese cannot be ignored, especially for the interpretation of a specific metonymy, i.e. CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT; (3) the (non)metonymic usage of a capital name is also determined by its sequencing and location in discourse. We hope this study may shed some light on the usage-based trend of current Cognitive Linguistics, i.e. investigating metonymy in authentic linguistic data by a range of empirical methodologies.

Funktionen der Metonymie im Sprachvergleich am Beispiel von Deutsch und Ungarisch

“…u.a. Panther/ Thornburg (1999bThornburg ( ), (2002b, Hilpert (2007), Zhang et al (2011), Panther (2015 sowie Zhang (2016). Kövecses (2002Kövecses ( ) und (2005 gehören auch in diese Reihe, zumal die kulturspezifische Variation der Metonymie auch in je einem speziellen Kapitel behandelt wird.…”

Who said ‘Abortion’? Semantic Variation and Ideology in Spanish Newspapers' Online Discussions

“…This type of semantic variation points to a difference in conceptualization, meaning a different understanding of that particular reality. Whether this is a question of nuance or a radical diversion is a matter that needs to be investigated empirically, together with the motivating, internal and external factors (as in Geeraerts et al 1994Geeraerts et al , 2010Grondelaers & Geeraerts 1998, 2003Robinson 2010;Zhang et al 2011). It is thus a sociolinguistic matter in its own right: if meanings are socially motivated, semantic variation must reflect this.…”

The concept of Family in Mandarin Chinese – A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to the Comprehension of Chinese Jia

“…Jing-Schmidt (2008) has discovered that due to cultural preferences, half of the Chinese expressions of verbal behavior are based on the ORGAN OF SPEECH ARTICULATION FOR SPEECH metonymy, and the rest are based on metaphors of VERBAL BEHAVIOR IS PHYSICAL ACTION, SPEECH IS CONTAINER, ARGUMENT IS WAR (or WORDS ARE WEAPONS) and WORDS ARE FOOD. Zhang (2011) has found out that cultural, conceptual and discursive factors interplay intricately to give rise to the variation in the application of CAPITAL FOR GOVERNMENT metonymy between Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese, and the social environment, the sequencing and location of a capital name can also determine the (non)metonymic usages of the capital name. Her comparative study about variation in metonymies for PERSON between Chinese and English has indicated "three main types of cross-linguistic variation at different levels of granularity: variation in the metonymic patterns for the general target category PERSON, variation in the metonymic patterns for specific kinds of person, and variation in the metonymic sources of a particular pattern" (Zhang, Speelman and Geeraerts 2015: 220), and physiological and cultural-social aspects of embodiment may jointly shape metonymic conceptualizations of PERSON, with bodily experience as the basis for the universality of metonymical patterns across different languages and cultural experience underlying culture-specific preferences of specific metonymies for a given target.…”