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Tracing social change through metaphor: A diachronic corpus-assisted analysis
Date Issued
2023
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Citation
Zeng, H., Ahrens, K., & Huang, C. R. (2023). Tracing social change through metaphor: A diachronic corpus-assisted analysis. In Huang, C. R., Harada, Y., Kim, J. B., Chen, S., Hsu, Y. Y., Chersoni, E., A, P., Zeng, H., Peng, B., Li, Y., & Li, J. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 37th pacific Asia conference on language, information and computation. PACLIC 2023, Hong Kong (pp. 903-911). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
This paper examines how conceptualizations of ‘election’ have changed in post-colonial Hong Kong.
Drawing on Burgers’ (2016) approach to model how metaphors change their focus on social topics over time, we study the uses of ELECTION metaphors in speeches by government leaders. These changes are classified as either fundamental changes (the use of metaphorical terms from a different domain) or incremental changes (changes in mapping principles within the same domain). We found a reliance on
JOURNEY metaphors in framing ELECTION issues. Incremental changes within the ELECTION IS A JOURNEY metaphor highlight a change between the first (1997-2007) and second decades (2008-2017) after the handover from Britain to China. Our study shows that analysing changes in metaphorical frames in discourse is a practical approach to reflect the conceptualizations of social change.
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