This paper reports a corpus-based, cognitive semantic study on profiling the varied uses of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black” with regard to its metaphorical polysemy. We hypothesize that the semantic (dis)similarities among the eight metaphorical meanings of hēi “black” can be captured by clustering their contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. The Behavioral Profiles approach is adopted for the analyses with the annotations of 800 instances for 46 contextual features and a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis conducted on the annotated data. The results show that the eight metaphorical senses of hēi “black” fall into three clusters. This clustering can be explained by the conceptual bases pertaining to color perceptions and color changes, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the corpus-based Behavioral Profiles approach in exploring the underlying cognitive mechanisms of metaphorical extensions and meaning differentiations.

中文翻译：

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中文颜色词 hēi 黑（“黑色”）的隐喻多义性

本文报告了一项基于语料库的认知语义研究，分析了中文颜色术语“黑”的隐喻多义性的不同用法。我们假设“黑”的八个隐喻含义之间的语义（不）相似性可以通过对其上下文特征进行聚类来捕获，包括搭配模式、形态句法和语义属性以及话语信息。采用行为概况方法进行分析，对 46 个上下文特征的 800 个实例进行注释，并对注释数据进行分层凝聚聚类分析。结果表明，hēi“黑”的八种隐喻意义分为三类。这种聚类可以通过与颜色感知和颜色变化相关的概念基础来解释，符合概念隐喻理论。这项研究证明了基于语料库的行为概况方法在探索隐喻扩展和意义分化的潜在认知机制方面的有效性。