A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Word Composition

This book describes the emergence of new meanings in two languages, English and Chinese. Drawing on a corpus methodology, it presents metaphors as a basic instrument of thinking and cognition studies from a conceptual metaphor perspective, probing the compositional potentiality of “light” in English and Chinese, and highlighting the generative mechanism for word composition through metaphorization.

The monograph includes detailed discussions of linguistic corpus construction, linguistic manifestations of metaphorization, the main motivation for the formation of metaphorical meanings, and socio-cultural influence in different languages. It expands the scope of previous studies and shows how conceptual metaphor studies can benefit from the use of a corpus methodology by providing not just a description, but an explanation, of how word composition develops. This book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in metaphor and intercultural studies, as well as cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and contrastive studies in English and Chinese.