Metaphorical polysemy and cognitive mechanism of tactile terms

Abstract This study investigates the metaphorical polysemy and cognitive mechanism of tactile terms through a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese lexeme yìng ( 硬 , ‘hard’), an area that remains less explored than visual terms among sensory vocabulary. Using a corpus-based behavioral profile methodology, 1,300 occurrences of yìng from the CCL Corpus were annotated across 41 contextual features, encompassing 118 variable levels. Hierarchical agglomerative clustering, random forest classification, and correlation analyses were employed to organize the 13 identified metaphorical senses into three coherent categories, each characterized by approximately ten salient features and their patterned co-occurrences. The findings provide an empirically grounded account of how tactile metaphors differ from visual ones in cognitive schemas (interaction-centrality vs attributes-centrality), illustrating how embodiment shape metaphorical extensions in modern Chinese.