Review of The Corpus-based Study of  Chinese Characters (Words) Metaphor  Models in Shuowen Jiezi

Shuowen Jiezi (说文解字; literally, explaining graphs and analyzing characters) is an early 2nd-century dictionary. It was not the first Chinese dictionary, but it was the first to analyze the structure of ancient Chinese characters, which made it the most remarkable in Chinese history. It innovatively organized characters through their shared graphic components, which distinguished itself from the previous early dictionaries and had far-reaching implications for the following Chinese character studies for nearly 2000 years. The relationship between language and cognition has become particularly popular in recent years. Cognitive linguists argue that language is intimately linked to embodied cognition, a link tempered by human interaction with the environment. Metaphors, long studied within the discipline known as rhetoric, are viewed as a major cognitive mechanism, rather than merely a linguistic device. Conceptual metaphors enable people to understand abstract concepts in terms of concrete concepts, and linguistic metaphors mirror human cognitive processing in return. In their new book, The Corpus-based Study of Chinese Characters (Words) Metaphor Models in Shuowen Jiezi 基于语料库的《说文解字》字(词)汇隐喻模式研究 (Wu et al., 2020), Professor Sixiong Wu 吴 世雄, Associate Professor Yunhui Zhou 周运会 and Min Zhang 章敏 from Fujian Normal University offer an approach that explores the ancient dictionary in the new era. In this book, the authors set up a significant corpus, the corpus of Chinese character metaphors, by sorting out the etymology of characters collected in Shuowen Jiezi and analyzing the metaphors used in structuring them. Based on the data of the corpus, the book systematically investigates the metaphor models of Chinese characters. The book consists of four chapters, with the first being the starting point at which the corpus approach to metaphor research is introduced. Chapter 1, “Corpus metaphor research,” outlines the history of metaphor research from Aristotle to the recent Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and reviews previous corpus-based metaphor studies and diachronic metaphor studies. Proceeding from previous work, the authors pointed out four criticisms in the current cognitive metaphor studies: the ignorance of diachronic analysis, the over-indulgence in the universal cognitive phycological model, the disregard for cultural influence, and the neglect of the corpus-based lexical evidence. To avoid these pitfalls, they argue that diachronic research should be introduced into metaphor studies. It can be helpful in amending conceptual metaphor theory, exploring the intertwined relationship between cognition and culture, and proposing a dynamic model for language evolution. In addition, they hold that in order to overcome the weakness of the introspective approach to conceptual metaphor theory, interdisciplinary methodology should be adopted in metaphor research. Thus, they proposed to use etymology and the corpus linguistics method in the investigation of metaphors. The ideas in the book are not isolated achievements in one single book, but a natural progression of the authors’ systematic research over years (Wu, 2008; Wu et al., 2016). Chapter 2, “Metalude and the corpus of Chinese character metaphor,” introduces the design, application and achievement of Metalude (Metaphor at Lingnan University, Department of English), an effective database of English-Chinese conventional and lexicalized metaphors. The authors absorb Metalude’s idea of cross-linguistic contrast and create a Review of The Corpus-based Study of Chinese Characters (Words) Metaphor Models in Shuowen Jiezi