A CCL and COCA-Based Contrastive Study of LIFE Metaphor in Chinese and English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes universalities and variations of LIFE metaphor via qualitative and quantitative analysis of data retrieved from two authoritative, general, and monolingual corpora—Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in Chinese and English. The study aims to explore the universalities and variations of LIFE metaphor in Chinese and English on the one hand, further the hidden reasons for the universalities and variations on the other. Results reveal that source domains like JOURNEY/VOYAGE, FOOD, WAR, DREAM, BOOK are employed to conceptualize LIFE both in Chinese and English justifying the universality of conceptual metaphor, which can be ascribed to Chinese and American people’s common bodily experience, common knowledge and experience about the world, common social and cultural experience. However, the frequency of conceptualizing FOOD, WAR, DREAM, BOOK is different, and the potential universal metaphors like FOOD show differences in their specific details. Besides, unique source domains are used for a particular culture (OPERA in Chinese). Different socio-cultural contexts, differential memory, Chinese and Americans’ different outlooks on life may account for LIFE metaphor’s cross-cultural variation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".