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- Title
Metaphorical language change is Self-Organized Criticality.
- Authors
Tang, Xuri; Ye, Huifang
- Abstract
One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as complex systems and the dynamic view of metaphor, this paper argues that metaphorical language change qualifies as a Self-Organized Criticality state and the linguistic expressions of a metaphor can be profiled as a fractal with spatio-temporal correlations. Synchronously, these metaphorical expressions self-organize into a self-similar, scale-invariant fractal that follows a power-law distribution; temporally, long range interdependence constrains the self-organization process by the way of transformation rules that are intrinsic of a language system. This argument is verified in the paper with statistical analyses of twelve randomly selected Chinese verb metaphors in a large-scale diachronic corpus.
- Subjects
LINGUISTIC change; CHINESE language; DYNAMICAL systems; STATISTICS
- Publication
Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory, 2024, Vol 20, Issue 1, p37
- ISSN
1613-7027
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/cllt-2022-0016