This paper selects temperature terms - English ‘cool’ and Korean ‘siwenhata’ which have the same literal meaning as the subjects, and investigates the figurative meanings derived from them based on a corpus, focusing on the construals. The purpose o ...
This paper selects temperature terms - English ‘cool’ and Korean ‘siwenhata’ which have the same literal meaning as the subjects, and investigates the figurative meanings derived from them based on a corpus, focusing on the construals. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning extension of the temperature term through the different languages and provide the linguistic universality and specificity. To achieve the goal, this study classifies all the figurative meanings searched from a corpus by means of semantically common characteristics, and analyzes cognitive mechanisms for their meaning extension which are metonymy, metaphor or conceptual blending. In addition, this study of the temperature terms - ‘cool’ and ‘siwenhata’ presents semantic similarities and differences between a corpus and a dictionary as well as between English and Korean. The main points of this study can be summarized.
The figurative meanings of the temperature term are extended primarily by the interaction of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending rather than a single cognitive mechanism. This study shows that there exist universal conceptual metaphor and metonymy even in different languages; they are basically motivated by conventional and physical experience.
Besides the universality, we can also find the linguistic characteristics: First, categorizing all the meanings found in the corpus, English ‘cool’ has seven extended meanings and Korean ‘siwenhata’ has nine ones. Second, English ‘cool’ extends its meanings in the semantic aspect of ‘reason’, ‘attraction’, ‘judgement,’ but Korean ‘siwenhata’ does in that of ‘material’, ‘taste’, ‘sound’, ‘body’, and ‘space.’ Third, when it comes to synesthesia, English shows ‘cool’ combined with the sense of temperature and vision; however, Korean shows ‘siwenhata’ more variously by combining the sense of temperature with that of vision, taste, hearing, and touch. Finally, compared with the meanings between a corpus and a dictionary, English ‘cool’ does not show big difference but Korean ‘siwenhata’ shows substantial difference.