Moon Imagery and Poetry Emotions: A Corpus-Based Analysis from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor

Abstract

The moon is abundant in imagery, and Chinese poets have expressed various emotions via this imagery. Based on the BLCU Corpus Center (BCC), this paper used the conceptual metaphor framework to analyse the moon imagery and emotions expressed in randomly selected 220 Song Cis. The author counted the frequency of different emotions, grammatical and lexical annotations, and analysed the imagery using specific conceptual metaphors (i.e., structural metaphor, orientation metaphor, ontological metaphor, and container metaphor). The paper also analysed the distribution of different emotions in the poems selected from the corpus using chi-square tests. Through the analysis, the author found that more negative emotions than positive ones were expressed in the selected Cis and that there were more Cis that express personal emotions and fewer that express concerns about society and changing dynasties. This paper draws on the structural, directional and ontological metaphors of conceptual metaphor to analyse the relationship between lexico-grammatical features and emotions expressed in Song Cis. The results revealed that poets used adjectives frequently in expressing different emotions and that more negative emotions were expressed by poets regardless of the dynasties in which those poets lived. This study has implications for future corpus-based analysis of typical imagery in classical Chinese literary works from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.