Exploring color metaphor with Behavioral Profiles: A usage-based analysis on the metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color term bái “white”

Abstract

This paper conducts a usage-based, cognitive-semantic study on semantic relations between the twelve metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color term, bái 白 “white”, with the Behavioral Profiles approach. The contextual variations of the twelve metaphorical meanings of bái are captured by 51 contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. With a dataset consisting of 1200 instances, two statistical methods are adopted to explore the semantic relations of these meanings, namely Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering and Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The results show that the twelve metaphorical senses of bái fall into four clusters, and their semantic relations can be empirically distinguished based on the proposed contextual features. Furthermore, we found that the identified semantic relations can be explained by mutually related conceptual metaphors based on the perceptual experiences of the white color regarding its three perceptual properties – absence of hue, highest brightness, and zero colorfulness. The present study ultimately demonstrates how the semantic relations among the twelve metaphorical meanings of bái can be empirically distinguished based on their linguistic encodings and explained by cognitive principles in line with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory.