"Searching for Happiness" or "Full of Joy"? Source Domain Activation Matters

Abstract

? Semantic subtleties like these torture second language learners, feed the imagina-tion of poets, and furnish language mavens with editorial careers. Our aim in the current work is to investigate in some depth what contributes to the selection of one word over another extremely similar word in language use. In particular, the question at hand is whether lexical choices are influenced by differences in the metaphorical patterns that the words in play participate in. The investigation of how metaphorical patterns influence lexical choice is useful not just as an end unto itself; it also provides a key to the role of metaphorical grounding in the mental representation of abstract words more broadly. The literature on near-synonyms is small but varied. It shares a focus on dis-tinguishing among similar words on the basis of distributional usage patterns. However, the lexical representations constructed by such distributional pattern differences are used for diverse purposes, such as linguistic theory building, language education and natural language processing technology. One typical example is a study of the differences in near-synonymous verbs in Mandarin Chinese. Chief, et al. (1998) looked at the near-synonym pair