A Cross-Cultural Corpus-Based Study of “Hole” and “Dong (洞)” Metaphors in English and Chinese
Abstract
As a common natural formation, the concept of “hole”—and its Chinese counterpart “dong (洞)”—stems from early human experience, particularly those related to cave dwelling and shelter seeking. Both lexical terms function as conceptual prototypes that have been extended metaphorically diverse languages. This study conducts a comparative analysis of the metaphorical extensions of “hole” in English and “dong” in Chinese, drawing on data from bilingual dictionaries and linguistic corpora, including Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Corpus. The analysis reveals that, although both terms share similar cognitive origins in the imagery of primitive caves and human habitation, variations in geographical environments, historical development, and social-cultural practices have led to different metaphorical pathways. By studying the development of "hole/dong" metaphor, this research intends to provide an insightful case for cross-linguistic metaphor research.
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