A Proposal for Cross-Modal Correlations Between Corpus and Image Data on Exploring Embodiment of Chinese Color Metaphor

The research aims to investigate a salient phenomenon in cognitive linguistics, color-based metaphorization, to explore the cross-modal correlation between linguistic and image representations of meaning using an empirical, data-driven approach. Color terms (CTs) are used to refer to emotional states, political stances, and other non-visual notions beyond their literal meanings. Although numerous studies have discussed the metaphorical senses of CTs in different languages, there are some fundamental issues that need to be re-examined: (1) What is an empirically convincing and theoretically valid framework to account for the cognitive mechanisms motivating color-based metaphorical extensions? (2) In what ways and for what reasons do basic CTs differ in their usage patterns of metaphorical mappings? (3) In what ways and to what extent are the linguistic meanings correlated with non-linguistic visual representations? The proposed research focuses on the five basic CTs in Chinese and adopts the Behavior Profiles approach to explore the cognitive motivations of their metaphorical extensions and employs the Visual Analysis approach to examine their cross-modal associations. Given the cross-modal empirical paradigm, results from the studies will shed new light on the sensory vs. affective bases of sense extension and offer unprecedented evidence for the interaction of linguistic metaphor and image portrayal. The research demonstrates a pioneering effort to utilize a cross-disciplinary framework to extend the frontiers of usage-based lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics.