ECONOMY IS A PERSON: A Chinese-English Corpora and Ontological-based Comparison Using the Conceptual Mapping Model

1 ECONOMY IS A PERSON: A Chinese-English Corpora and Ontological-based Comparison Using the Conceptual Mapping Model Siaw Fong Chung Kathleen Ahrens Chu-Ren Huang National Taiwan University National Taiwan University Academic Sinica claricefong6376@hotmail.com kathleenahrens@yahoo.com churen@gate.sinica.edu.tw Abstract This paper proposes a corpora-based approach in comparing the Mapping Principles for economy metaphors in English and Chinese. The Mapping Principles are validated using an upper ontology (SUMO). This research extends on the work of Ahrens, Chung and Huang (2003) by examining the ‘economy’ metaphors in Chinese and English. In Ahrens, Chung and Huang (2003), they proposed to delimit the Mapping Principle via two steps: First, they used a corpora-based analysis on the word jingji ‘economy’ to find out the most prototypical mappings in a metaphor Second, they used an upper ontology (SUMO) to examine whether the mapping principle is a representation of conceptual knowledge in the ontology. This paper goes a step further by examining the similarities and differences of source domains in English and Chinese. Using the Conceptual Mapping Model, this paper looks particularly into the example of ECONOMY IS A PERSON. This paper observes the representation of shared knowledge in the source domain in different languages and explains the similarities and differences by looking into the definition of inference rules in the upper ontology of SUMO. Key Words: Corpora, Conceptual Mapping Model, Mapping Principle, SUMO, ontology 2 1.0 Introduction In the framework of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1993), conceptual metaphors are mappings from a concrete source domain to an abstract target domain. Lakoff proposes a “general principle” which is “part of the conceptual system underlying English” (1993:306). Ahrens (2002), however, suggested that this ‘general principle’ can be formulated in the form of Mapping Principle, an intuitive-based principle stating the underlying reason for source-domain mappings. These rules were verified with offline experiments (Ahrens 2002 and Lu 2002) in which they successfully predicted the reading times for metaphors that follow the mapping principles and metaphors that do not. Therefore, the ‘general principle’ can be delimited by providing Mapping Principle, which is specific for a particular metaphor to reason the mappings between source and target domains. Ahrens, Chung and Huang (2003) proposed to delimit the Mapping Principle via two steps: First, they used a corpora-based analysis on the word jingji ‘economy’ to find out the most prototypical mappings in a metaphor and hence formed the mapping principle. Second, they used an upper ontology (SUMO http://ontology.teknowledge.com/) to examine whether the Mapping Principle is a representation of conceptual knowledge in the ontology. For example, in examining ECONOMY IS COMPETITION, the knowledge of ‘competition’ has a corresponding 3 node with Contest in SUMO and “a War is kind of ViolentContest, which in term is a kind of Contest” (Ahrens, Chung and Huang 2003). Therefore, the metaphors ECONOMY IS COMPETITION and ECONOMY IS WAR can be subsumed under the same knowledge representation. These findings support the mapping principles that there are specific principles governing the source-target domain mappings. In this paper, we will focus on one metaphor …

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