Xu Yang, Malt Barbara C, Srinivasan Mahesh
Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science Program, University of California, Berkeley, United States.
Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2017 Aug;96:41-53. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.05.005. Epub 2017 Jun 8.
One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.
语言能够通过有限的词汇传达潜在无限的一系列概念的一种方式是，将新出现的意义压缩到单词中，以至于随着时间的推移，单个单词开始表达多种相关的意义。我们提出，总体的交际和认知压力在英语历史上新的隐喻意义如何从现有词义发展而来的过程中创造了系统的方向性。给定大量语义域对，我们使用计算模型来测试在过去一千年中哪些域更常作为隐喻映射的起点（源域），哪些作为终点（目标域）。我们发现，一组紧凑的变量，包括外在性、具身性和效价，解释了过去1100年记录的约5000个隐喻映射中的大多数的方向性。这些结果提供了首个大规模的历史证据，表明隐喻映射是系统的，并由可衡量的交际和认知原则驱动。
