Identification Of Source-domain Triggers In Political Discourse

Over the past decades,linguists have taken a broader view of language and are borrowing methods and findings from other disciplines such as cognition and computer sciences,neurology,biology,sociology,psychology,and anthropology.This development has enriched our knowledge of language and communication.Recently,a proliferation of conceptual metaphor research derives from corpus examination,and linguists are increasingly interested in quantitative and experimental approaches to reveal co-occurrence patterns indicative of source and target domain associations.Some mappings between source and target are transparent and appear in collocation patterns in natural language data.However,other metaphors are more complex because the target domain is lexically divorced from the source.Using political discourse as a case study,the researcher proposes a semi-automated corpus-based method to quantitatively evaluate metaphorical occurrence.First,a restricted corpus,Political Discourse Corpus(PDC),which embodies four sub-corpora,is established;second,PDC is quantitatively scanned for frequent metaphors;finally,by pulling source,not target domain examples,the investigator quantitatively assesses metaphorical use in political discourse role of super source triggers in conceptual metaphor retrieving.Two questions are addressed in this paper:(1)what functions does concordance searching fulfill in the process of conceptual metaphor evaluation? And(2)how can this semi-automated collocation searching technique be employed to mine source domains efficiently in the field of political discourse? The research results suggest that the usage of collocation searching in the baseline corpus yields a large number of potential source domain triggers,which fits into three categories of lexemes: trigger lexeme,significant trigger lexeme,and super trigger lexeme.Super triggers lexemes that consistently activate the metaphorical source domain can be used to mine more metaphorical data.