A Semantic Study on FISHING Metaphor and Ontology in Yami Traditional Songs

• Main Authors: Yin-Sheng Tai, 戴印聲
• Other Authors: Der-Hwa V. Rau
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13503598138855553839

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系研究所 === 96 === The purpose of this study is to build a Yami ontology of traditional songs by employing Protégé, an open-source tool for editing and managing ontologies developed by Stanford University. Based on the taxonomies in WordNet (Fellbaum, 1999) and Yami Texts with Reference Grammar and Dictionary (Rau & Dong, 2006), we extracted and classified verbs and nouns of metaphors from 120 Yami songs which were transcribed and translated into Chinese by Dong (1995). Following Ahrens’s conceptual mapping model (2002) and the most frequent mappings (Arhens et al., 2004), an ontology-based and corpus-driven approach toward predicting lexical meaning of conceptual metaphors, we found that Yami people preferred to employ the conceptual metaphor of “fishing” frame in traditional songs in praising the host’s diligence in a ceremony celebrating completion of a workhouse. In addition, we further employed Conceptual Blending theory (Fauconnier, 1997, 1998, 2002) to analyze the riddles of FISHING metaphors. As a consequence, the elements/senses from the two inputs could serve as cues for thrashing out the target words the users want to look up, and availed our ontology which is built with Protégé. With this function, users could search the target by the word’s elements or senses. In the last section, we made a comparison with those FISHING IS FARMING metaphors in the website “Digital Archiving Yami Language Documentation.” Finally, after comparing the 14 FISHING metaphors in the corpus-website “Digital Archiving Yami Language Documentation” with our FISHING metaphor ontology, eight tokens could be found in our ontology. Eventually, the Yami FISHING metaphor ontology in traditional songs can serve as a fundamental template to which can be added more corpus available online from the Yami language documentation website (http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw/yami) to build ontologies for other domains.