Author(s)

Jiawen Zu ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China

Corresponding Author

Jiawen Zu

ABSTRACT

Language, as a tool of human thought and communication, evolves in meaning, reflecting both a deeper understanding of the world and social changes. The sense of touch, as a fundamental human sense, enables perception through mechanical stimulation of the skin, with tactile adjectives like "soft" and "hard" commonly describing these sensations, as demonstrated by word frequency data from COCA and BNC. This article explores the metaphorical extension of "soft" and "hard" in English, employing cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory, and mapping mechanisms to analyze the semantic evolution and characteristics of these adjectives.

KEYWORDS

Semantic extension; tactile adjective; conceptual metaphor; mapping

CITE THIS PAPER

Jiawen Zu, Metaphorical Semantic Extension and Social Change: A Case Study of the Tactile Adjectives "Soft" and "Hard". Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2024) Vol. 7: 65-70. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2024.070710.

REFERENCES

[1] George Lakoff. The contemporary theory of metaphor [A]. Ortony, A. Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed) [C]. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
[2] E. Yurina, E. Shlotgauer. "Russian Tactile Metaphor in Terms of Emotiveness (A Study of the Lexico-Phraseological Field Gladit’)." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije (2023).
[3] Ana Werkmann Horvat, Marianna Bolognesi, Nadja Althaus. Attention to the source domain of conventional metaphorical expressions: Evidence from an eye tracking study. Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 215, 2023, Pages 131-144.
[4] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. [M]. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.
[5] Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. University of Oxford Press, 2022.

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