A Multiple Correspondence Analysis on the Adverbial Uses of the Chinese Color Term Bai ‘White’

This paper conducts a corpus-based semantic analysis on the adverbial uses of the Chinese color term bai ‘white’ regarding its two metaphorical meanings – “In vain/For no reason” and “Free of charge”. Based on distributional semantics, it is hypothesized that the semantic (dis)similarities of the two meanings can be captured by their usage features in real corpora. In the current study, the multiple correspondence analysis technique is employed to explore the distinctive usage patterns of the two metaphorical meanings based on a dataset that consists of 195 sentences randomly extracted from corpora. These sentences are manually annotated with 19 usage features, encompassing linguistic information from lexical-collocational, semantic, and discourse levels. By visualizing the general distributional patterns of the two meanings and their association strengths with the distinctive usage features, it is found that there are remarkable (dis)similarities between the two metaphorical senses regarding their usage variations, which can be used to explain the cognitive motivations of the two meanings in line with the Conceptual Metaphor theory.