An Ontology-based Research On The Lexical Field Of Taste In Chinese And Korean

This study investigates the lexical field of taste in Chinese and Korean by comparing theliteral and metaphorical meanings of these words. Through the analysis of an extensiveamount of examples within the two languages, this research attempts to understand thecognitive process behind which words related to the sense of taste are given new meanings byanalogy. It mainly uses the theoretical frame of cognitive linguistics to examine the semanticexpansion of the literal meaning of these words to the metaphorical expression of humanfeelings.In this research project, different theories of metaphor such as the Conceptual Metaphortheory and the Conceptual Blending theory are used to design a model that shows how newmeanings are generated based on metaphorical analogies. An ontology of the words from thelexical field of taste is then built by using OWL (Web Ontology Language), allowing acomputerized identification and comparison of the semantic differences between Chinese andKorean.This ontology, although at its first elaboration stage, can be applied to differentacademic fields such as comparative linguistics, teaching Chinese as a second language andcomputational linguistics. It can help Korean students better understand the nuances betweenwords from the lexical field of taste used in Chinese and Korean, since it is built on a modelthat reflects human intuition and therefore shows the different connotations in both languages.It can also be incorporated to other existing lexical knowledge base, such as HowNet.