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Towards a metaphor-annotated corpus of Mandarin Chinese

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Abstract

Building on the success of the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus, which comprises English texts annotated with metaphor following the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrjie Universiteit (MIPVU; Steen et al. in Cogn Linguist 21(4):765–796, 2010a; Steen et al. in A method for linguistic metaphor identification: from MIP to MIPVU. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2010b), this study has three aims: (1) to adapt and evaluate the transferability and reliability of MIPVU for Mandarin Chinese; (2) to construct a corpus of Chinese texts annotated for metaphor using the adapted procedure; and (3) to examine the distribution of metaphor-related words across Chinese texts in three different written registers: academic discourse, fiction, and news. The results of our inter-annotator reliability test show that MIPVU can be reliably applied to linguistic metaphor identification in Chinese texts. Our metaphor-annotated corpus consists of texts randomly sampled from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, totaling 30,012 words (about 10,000 for each register). Data analysis reveals that approximately one out of every nine lexical units in our Chinese corpus is related to metaphor, that there is considerable variation in metaphor density across different registers and lexical categories, and that metaphor density is significantly lower in Chinese than in English texts. Our assessment of the replicability of MIPVU for Mandarin Chinese adds to the groundbreaking methodological contribution that Steen et al. (2010a, b) has made to metaphor research. The metaphor-annotated corpus of Mandarin Chinese contributes a valuable language resource for Chinese metaphor researchers, and our analysis of the distribution of metaphor-related words in the corpus offers useful new insights into the extent and use of metaphor in Chinese discourse.

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Notes

  1. The VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus is available at: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/headers/2541.xml.

  2. In this paper, the terms ‘lexical unit’ and ‘word’ are used interchangeably in contexts where the differentiation is not important.

  3. The files in the science category cover a broad range of academic disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, etc.

  4. The corpora consulted, besides LCMC, included the Chinese National Corpus and the Sinica Corpus.

  5. Among previous studies that applied the earlier version of the annotation protocol (MIP) to Chinese, some (e.g. Duann and Huang 2015; Han 2014) also adapted the procedure to include metaphorical interpretations involved in the internal structures of Chinese characters and compound words.

  6. We also recognize that, by staying as close to the word segmentation results as provided by LCMC as possible with respect to the delimitation of lexical units, this study also inherited the constraints shared by Chinese tokenizers and their practical solutions to some thorny cases of discontinuous compounds, in particular, the VOCs split by aspect morphemes and the RVCs in the potential form (see the discussion in this section below). An alternative solution is to manually re-segment these split compounds, based on the more widely held view in the Chinese linguistics literature (e.g., Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981) that treats the aspects markers within VOCs as suffixes as well as the potential markers de 得 and bù 不 between the two parts of RVCs as infixes.

  7. It is also possible, albeit extremely rare, for other types of Chinese compounds to be used discontinuously, or “ionized” (Chao 1968) (e.g. yōumò 幽默 ‘humor’ → yōu le tā yī mò 幽了他一默 ‘to make a joke with him’ and kāngkǎi 慷慨 ‘generous’ → kāng tā rén zhī kǎi 慷他人之慨 ‘generous with other people’s goods’). Such pseudo-VOCs differ from regular VOCs in two key aspects. First, the two parts of pseudo-VOCs in ionization are not independent words and thus cannot be examined separately for their contextual and basic meanings. Second, the two parts of pseudo-VOCs do not have a verb-object relation, so these forms would not have the dual status of a morphologically complex word and a syntactic phrase as true VOCs do (cf. Packard 2000). Given such internal properties of pseudo-VOCs, in cases of ionization, their two split parts are treated as a single lexical unit rather than separate ones.

  8. In all analyses, tokens tagged as MFlags are not considered MRWs, but those tagged as WIDLLI are so that unwarranted exclusion of linguistic metaphors can be avoided.

  9. Work on automated metaphor detection using the VUAMC is already under way (e.g. Do Dinh and Gurevych 2016; Dunn 2013; Haagsma and Bjerva 2016).

Abbreviations

1pl :

First person plural pronoun

adv :

Adverbial marker (de 地)

assoc :

Associative (-de 的)

cop :

Copular

nom :

Nominalizer

3sg :

Third person singular pronoun

asp :

Aspect marker

cl :

Classifier

gen :

Genitive (-de 的)

neg :

Negator

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This project was funded by a Gil Watz Early Career Professorship in Language and Linguistics to the first author. Special thanks go to Chan-Chia Hsu and Eric Po-Chung Lin for their participation in the inter-annotator reliability test. We would also like to thank Haiyang Ai for his assistance at the early stage of this project. Any remaining inadequacies are our sole responsibility.

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  1. Department of Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, 304 Sparks Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Xiaofei Lu & Ben Pin-Yun Wang

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  1. Xiaofei Lu
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Lu, X., Wang, B.PY. Towards a metaphor-annotated corpus of Mandarin Chinese. Lang Resources & Evaluation 51, 663–694 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-017-9392-9

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