Economy is a transportation_device: contrastive representation of source domain knowledge in English and Chinese

摘要

We offer a preliminary study of how knowledge may be represented differently in different languages. In particular, we account for the contrast between English and Chinese when identical target domain knowledge is represented with two different, yet related, source domains in each language. We incorporate corpora analysis in English and Chinese with SUMO to delimit the source domains identified using the conceptual mapping model (Ahrens. 2002). In particular, we investigate economy metaphors with the source domains of aeroplane and moving vehicle. These two source domains are found in Chinese and English respectively. Hence, we ask the question whether these source domains should be conflated under a general source domain such as TransportationDevice or should they form independent source domains. Our study addresses this issue by using the SUMO ontology as well as the mapping principles found in the corpora analysis. Our studies contribute to automatizing the source-target domain mappings in conceptual metaphors.