Dr. ZENG Huiheng, WinnieWinnieDr. ZENG HuihengAhrens, KathleenKathleenAhrens2024-04-232024-04-232018Zeng, H., & Ahrens, K. (2018 Oct 21). Metaphorical framing in postcolonial Hong Kong political speeches (1997-2017): The role of mapping principles in corpus-based metaphor analysis. The 17th International Conference on the Processing of East Asian Languages and The 9th Conference on Language, Discourse, and Cognition, National Taiwan University.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/9573Metaphorical frames can be used to shape public discourse by presenting and defining specific issues, as they contain both linguistic and conceptual content (Burgers, Konijn & Steen 2016). This paper adopts the Conceptual Mapping Model approach (Ahrens 2010) to analyse the mapping principles of metaphors with an attempt to find out the ways in which metaphors are used as framing strategies in political discourse. Four research questions are addressed:<br> (10) a. What are common source domains found in the corpus of postcolonial Hong Kong political speeches?<br> b. What do these common source domains map to in terms of target domains?<br> c. What are the mapping principles between these target and source domains?<br> d. How do the patterns of the mapping principles reflect the ways in which metaphors are used in the framing of different societal issues?<br> In order to examine these questions, we independently compiled an English corpus of political speeches ranging from 1 July 1997 to 1 July 2017 by Hong Kong senior officials (http://www.info.gov.hk/isd/speech/sensp.htm). The corpus contains 1,241 speeches by 11 politicians in the three highest principal official positions in Hong Kong: 496 speeches by the Chief Secretary for Administration, 427 speeches by the Financial Secretary and 318 speeches by the Secretary for Justice. A preliminary bottom-up analysis was conducted in 116 randomly selected speeches.<br> 5,962 metaphorical instances were coded in total. Frequent source domains were found to be BUILDING, LIVING ORGANISM, JOURNEY, PHYSICAL OBJECT, BUSINESS, WAR and SPORT. In terms of the target domains associated with these source domains, SOCIAL ISSUES, ECONOMIC ISSUES and POLITICAL ISSUES are the most commonly found. Patterns of the frequent target and source domain mappings show that: 1) the target domain of SOCIAL ISSUES in Hong Kong is discussed in terms of BUSINESS and WAR source domains more frequently than expected by chance; 2) the target domain of ECONOMIC ISSUES is discussed in terms of LIVING ORGANISM, PHYSICAL OBJECT and SPORT source domains more frequently than expected by chance; 3) the target domain of POLITICAL ISSUES are discussed in terms of BUILDING and JOURNEY source domains more frequently than expected by chance.<br> We further examined the mapping principles between one same source domain (WAR) and different target domains (SOCIAL ISSUES, ECONOMIC ISSUES, and POLITICAL ISSUES). The results demonstrate that the source domain of WAR primarily maps the concepts of ’violence’, ’offence’ and ’victim’ to the target domain of SOCIAL ISSUES; the source WAR primarily maps the concepts of ’strategy’, ’forefront’ and ’turmoil’ to the target domain of ECONOMIC ISSUES; the source WAR primarily maps the concepts of ’protecting’, ’safeguarding’ and ’defending’ to the target domain of POLITICAL ISSUES. In addition, results from the evaluations on the metaphorical keywords indicate that overall social issues in Hong Kong are addressed in more negative ways while economic and political issues are discussed in more positive ways. These results reveal that different aspects of the WAR source domain have been selected by Hong Kong politicians in the framing of social, economic and political issues.enConference Paper