Landslide metaphor: a cross-linguistic examination

Yan Zhang and Wenxing Yang ()
Additional contact information
Yan Zhang: Gannan Medical University
Wenxing Yang: Yangzhou University

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract In prior natural disasters metaphor and Mandarin corpus analysis, Mandarin滑坡(huá pō) (Landslide in English) stood out and got salient in metaphorical percentage (53.5%) among top ten frequently used natural disaster frames. Departing from this, we made a comparative study between English Landslide and Mandarin滑坡and their metaphorical implications in both languages. In this article, it was shown that there was a widespread metaphorical usage of English Landslide and Mandarin滑坡 in both languages, supported by the highly metaphorical percentage of 82.9% and 53.5% respectively. Differences as well as similarities were identified in metaphorical target domains between English Landslide and Mandarin滑坡, with English Landslide mapping on victory (political victory especially), amount, decline and Mandarin 滑坡mapping exclusively on decline or downturn (economic decline mainly). We have referred to research on framing and to frame to explain why this might be the case concerning different target domains within and across languages.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-025-05697-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:12:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-025-05697-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05697-9

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().