Abstract
The recent studies on metaphor ave proved it to be an important language device in our ordinary conceptual system and treat metaphors as conventionalized cognitive structure. Adopting Lakoff’ view of interpreting metaphor cognitively as a mapping relation from a source domain to a target domain. Ahrens present a processing account, the Conceptual Mapping Model, for the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The Conceptual Mapping Model point out that the conceptual correspondences between a source and target domain must be analyzed in order to determine the underlying reasons for the source-target pairings. This underlying reason is formulated in terms of a Mapping Principle.In this paper, we propose an ontology-based and corpus-driven approach to delimit the source domains for stock market metaphor in Chinese. Using a corpora-based approach, we postulate three metaphors in the stock market based frequency: THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL STOCK MARKET IS OCEAN WATER, THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL STOCK MARKET IS PEROSN, THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL STOCK MARKET IS WAR. Our focus is on these three frequent metaphors. We proposed to delimit the source domains in three metaphors via two steps: First, we used a corpora-based analysis to find out the most prototypical mappings in a metaphor, that is we will demonstrate how the process of establishing mapping principles. Second, we used an upper ontology (SUMO) to examine whether the mapping principle is a representation of conceptual knowledge in the ontology. We verified the Mapping Principles are validated using an upper ontology (SUMO) and constrain the Mapping Principle so that there is only one main Mapping Principle per source domain. This paper goes a step further by the proposition-schema to examine the conceptualization stock market metaphor in Chinese. In each metaphor, we can identify three or four proposition-schemas for conceptual mapping. Such conceptual mapping incidentally matches syntactic manifestation in terms of the grammatical parts of speech. Such findings support the theory on metaphorical mapping (Ahrens 1999).