Metaphoricity Rating of Chinese KIND Metaphor Expressions

Abstract Metaphors are ubiquitous in human language, and there has been an increasing interest in metaphor processing and interpretation from the field of computational and cognitive linguistics. Although metaphors have been greatly researched, there remain certain kinds of metaphors that are under-researched. One of them is KIND metaphors. KIND metaphors are less discussed, and less noticed, for their status as metaphors is often less recognized. In the paper, we looked at KIND metaphors by first identifying 245 sentences of KIND metaphors from the Corpus of Contemporary Taiwanese Mandarin, and later rated the metaphoricity of these metaphorical expressions. The evaluation of the rated data reported an inter-rater agreement (Krippendorff’s alpha) of 0.65 and a unanimous percentage of 37%, near a tentative agreement, if we used the strictest criterion to keep the quality of our rating. 1 Introduction The research of metaphors has blossomed in the late 80s and early 90s and has been given great attention for decades. Different theories of metaphors have been proposed since then although the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff and Turner, 1989) was the widely-received one in the 1990s. More review of Chinese metaphors can be found in Ahrens and Chung (2019). Although many studies of various languages have tried to validate the CMT, the theory has also received criticisms from many (among many, Vervaeke and Kennedy (1996) was a direct criticism of its example grouping). Recently, the CMT has been revitalized for it is believed to have new contributions in shedding light on language framing or in explaining how “[d]ifferent metaphors frame the same topic in different ways, facilitating different inferences and evaluations” (Potts and Semino, 2019, p. 81). The fact that the CMT has become active in recent development has not changed the types of metaphors being noticed. For example, some marked metaphors, as those mentioned by Goatly (1997), are still under- researched. KIND metaphor is one such type. Goatly (1997, p. 174) surveyed some markers of metaphors such as (a) superordinate terms (identified by the use of sort of, kind of); (b) copular similes (like, as); (c) clausal similes (as if, as though); (d) perceptual processes (seemed, sounded, looked, felt, tasted, +like/as though/as if), etc. These markers were later used in the development of Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) but sort of, kind of and other “[m]ore general signals of all indirectness” was not included for “it is not always clear that they signal metaphoricity or other aspects of discourse” (Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, and Krennmayr, 2010, pp. 40-41). In example such that in (1), the metaphorical expression is marked by a kind of, Metaphoricity Rating of Chinese KIND Metaphor Expressions Siaw-Fong Chung Meng-Hsien Shih National Chengchi University National Chung Cheng University sfchung@nccu.edu.tw simon.xian@gmail.com Yu-Hsiang Shen Wei-Ting Tseng National Chengchi University National Chengchi University 108161001@nccu.edu.tw 108161004@nccu.edu.tw which serves to mark a Transfer metaphor, 1 but further investigation of this metaphor marker is needed. (1) I have no relish for the country; it’s a kind of healthy grave. This …

Content truncated to 500 words