A constructional approach to conceptual metaphor: A case study on COMPLETION IS UP in Mandarin
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The present study shows how a constructional approach (Croft 2001; Goldberg 1995; Langacker 2008) is useful in the investigation of motivation of conceptual metaphor, with COMPLETION IS UP in Mandarin as illustration. Although COMPLETION IS UP has been claimed to account for the 'completive' sense of up in English verb-particle constructions (Hampe 2000, 2002; Kovecses 2001), literature has not reached a definitive answer regarding the motivation of the metaphor. In view of this dangling issue, the present study investigates the positive pole of the vertical dimension in Chinese, linguistically elaborated as shang. The spatial particle has been reported to exhibit a completive sense (Lu, Submitted; Lu and Su 2012), the extension to which is thus obviously metaphorically motivated by COMPLETION IS UP. Using authentic corpus data, we classify the various usages of shang into semantic clusters, each with its own constructional characteristics. We argue that the extension from the prototypical sense 'vertically higher and in contact with' to 'completive' can be explained by the principle of semantic attenuation (Langacker 1999, 2008). Following the observation, we claim that the 'completive' sense of shang is a result of a gradual profile shift that gives the conceptual scene an increasing endpoint focus, with the conceptual residue of CONTACT remaining in the semantic cluster of 'completive.' The above findings have important implications. First, a constructional approach to polysemy, i.e. observing form-meaning pairings related to a metaphorically motivated semantic extension, can reveal the details of how conceptual metaphor arises through a gradual reduction of conceptual substrates. In addition, a constructional approach to conceptual metaphor provides a compelling alternative to a purely conceptual and experiential explanation with solid linguistic evidence. |
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