中英知识本体与概念隐喻

關于經濟隱喻的研究,通常都強調不同語言間隱喻的異同,而很少會注意到為何不同的語言會使用不同的概念隱喻。甚至有的研究會發現很難精確解釋,為何有些隱喻在不同的語言就會有相似或相異的形式。本文示范了一種勾勒概念理據輪廓的方法——透過上層知識本體,來推論概念理據可能就是不同文化使用的概念隱喻有所異同的原因。本文以中英文為例說明此方法,也解釋了為何有些概念隱喻對于中文—英文學習者而言更困難,反之亦然。

Previous studies on the teaching and learning of economic metaphors often emphasize the similarities and differences cross-linguistically. Few have looked at the reasons why different conceptual metaphor terms are used in two languages. One may even find it hard to pinpoint why some metaphors are interpreted as similar or different forms in a different language. This becomes more difficult for natural language understanding where representations of human language are made for machine to process. This paper demonstrates a methodology copable of outlining the conceptual motivations that may have caused the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors used in different cultures. These motivations are the underlying reasons that show the shared or differing conceptual systems which were discovered through using an upper ontology ( i.e., the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO) . This paper exemplifies the use of this methodology in Mandarin and English data. The results provide expla-nation as to why certain conceptual metaphors cause more difficulty to Mandarin-English learners,and vice versa.