Kathleen Ahrens

Kathleen Ahrens
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of English and Communication

BA, MA, PhD

About

173
Publications
54,482
Reads
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1,742
Citations
Introduction
Understanding lexical meaning has been the driving impetus behind much of my research. In earlier research, I focused on the construction of a psycholinguistic theory of sense processing, and the construction of a cognitive model to explain conceptual and novel metaphor processing. My current research direction now takes context into account, by examining the lexical choices and conceptual metaphors used by speakers of different political backgrounds in different political genres.
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - present
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Position
  • Professor
August 2008 - August 2015
Hong Kong Baptist University
Position
  • Head of Faculty
August 1996 - July 2008
National Taiwan University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Education
September 1991 - August 1995
University of California, San Diego
Field of study
  • Linguistics
September 1991 - August 1993
University of California, San Diego
Field of study
  • Linguistics
September 1987 - August 1991
National Taiwan University
Field of study
  • Chinese Language and Literature

Publications

Publications (173)
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the theory of lexical knowledge set forth in the Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (Biq 2000) and extends its scope to include issues concerning verbal polysemy. Previous versions of the theory postulated that different event structures required sense distinctions. In examining corpora data for the verbs 'put'...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we demonstrate that identifying the mappings between the source and target domains for a conceptual metaphor allows for both a greater understanding of the conceptual basis of metaphors, and more effective language translation. We first introduce and explain the Animal Metaphor to support our idea. We show that the Animal Metaphor exi...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter takes the complex knowledge systems of metaphors and shows that their structured knowledge can be represented and predicted by ontology. The complex knowledge system of metaphors contains two knowledge systems, source domain and target domain, as well as the knowledge mapping between the two domains. Hence metaphors offer a test case o...
Conference Paper
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We offer a preliminary study of how knowledge may be represented differently in different languages. In particular, we account for the contrast between English and Chinese when identical target domain knowledge is represented with two different, yet related, source domains in each language. We incorporate corpora analysis in English and Chinese wit...
Article
Neologisms reflect new ideas or new concepts in our life and play an important role in cultural transmission and the vitality of human language. The explosion of neologisms, especially in the past two decades, can also be ascribed to the popularity and accessibility of digital content and social media. In this paper, we focus on the issue of how ne...
Article
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Conceptual metaphors are one of many linguistic devices that can potentially encode and reinforce gender stereotypes. However, little is known about how metaphors encode gender stereotypes, and in previous literature the concept of “gendered metaphor” has been mostly assumed rather than attested. We take the first step to tackle this issue by exami...
Chapter
With the development of information technologies, our world currently faces such an overwhelming mass of neologisms. Therefore, the study of neologisms has become an important research topic in recent years [1]. In this research, we investigate the factors that facilitate the efficient propagation of Chinese neologisms, based on Internet usage data...
Conference Paper
This paper examines how conceptualizations of 'election' have changed in post-colonial Hong Kong. Drawing on Burgers' (2016) approach to model how metaphors change their focus on social topics over time, we study the uses of ELECTION metaphors in speeches by government leaders. These changes are classified as either fundamental changes (the use of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper examines how conceptualizations of 'election' have changed in post-colonial Hong Kong. Drawing on Burgers' (2016) approach to model how metaphors change their focus on social topics over time, we study the uses of ELECTION metaphors in speeches by government leaders. These changes are classified as either fundamental changes (the use of...
Article
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Understanding the nature of meaning and its extensions (with metaphor as one typical kind) has been one core issue in figurative language study since Aristotle’s time. This research takes a computational cognitive perspective to model metaphor based on the assumption that meaning is perceptual, embodied, and encyclopedic. We model word meaning repr...
Article
Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). T...
Article
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This study proposes an operational approach to a metaphorical framing analysis using large-scale data. We conducted a case analysis of how WAR metaphors are framed to address various societal issues in a corpus of public speeches by Hong Kong government officials. By investigating patterns of lexical choices under the source domain of WAR and the u...
Article
Full-text available
Nouns in human languages mostly profile concrete and abstract entities. But how much eventive information can be found in nouns? Will such eventive information found in sensory nouns have anything to do with the cognitive representation of the basic human senses? Importantly, is there any ontological and/or cognitive motivation that can account for...
Chapter
Human sensations and emotions are our primary embodied feelings in experiencing the outside world. The two systems are closely intertwined and jointly contribute to cognitive processes such as language use. However, how the two systems interact as manifested in our languages is still not well understood. This paper utilizes perceptual strengths and...
Chapter
Kathleen Ahrens and Winnie Huiheng Zeng focus on the semantics of metaphors relating to democracy, using a corpus of early 21st century newspaper and magazine editorials from Hong Kong, Beijing and Taipei. They find marked differences in how and how often democracy is metaphorized in each city – more frequently in Beijing editorials than in either...
Chapter
Pam Peters, Tobias Bernaisch and Kathleen Ahrens examine the range of modal verbs in a corpus of newspaper editorials from 2016, published in Hong Kong, Beijing and Taipei. The paper uses inferential statistics to analyse the distributions of canonical modals and semi-modals, especially those with differing predictive force (will, would, going to)....
Article
Full-text available
The present paper explores the synchronic variations and diachronic changes in political discourses in Hong Kong (HK) and in Mainland of People’s Republic of China (PRC). The relationship between lengths of linguistic constructs and their immediate constituents (including sentences and clauses, and clauses and words) are fitted using the function y...
Article
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This study seeks to clarify the nature of linguistic synesthesia using a lexical-conceptual account. Based on a lexical analysis of Mandarin synesthetic usages, we find that (1) linguistic synesthesia maps the metaphorical meaning between two domains; and (2) linguistic synesthetic mappings and conceptual metaphoric mappings have similar behaviors...
Chapter
Full-text available
Most previous research has investigated how embodied cognition captures concrete notions (e.g. money), but the role sensory modalities play in more abstract concepts (e.g. time) lacks empirical research—in particular, how abstractness is grounded in perceptual experiences. In this paper, a sensorimotor strength rating study (also known as modality...
Article
On the basis of Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory, this paper investigates the cross-cultural and cross-language variations in the pragmemes to call for social distancing in public health campaigns to combat COVID-19. We compare the officially released posters calling for social distancing in English and Chinese in two neighboring cities with distinctive...
Article
Full-text available
Sensorimotor information is vital to the conceptual representation of our knowledge system. This study collects perceptual and action ratings for 664 disyllabic nouns among 438 native speakers and creates the first and largest dataset of sensorimotor norms for nouns in Chinese. Using aggregated semantic covariates, including concreteness ratings fr...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study introduces a Time Series Analysis approach to metaphor development in a corpus of public discourse as a case study to examine the potential implications for the strategic use of metaphors in discourse over time. The corpus covers 20 years of public speeches by the government leaders in Hong Kong. We conducted an ARIMA time series modelin...
Article
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We undertake a corpus-based diachronic analysis in order to explore how leaders in China and Hong Kong have employed metaphors of EDUCATION in major governmental speeches and reports both before and after Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China. The results of this study demonstrate that Hong Kong SAR Chief Executives have similar patterns of so...
Article
The goal of this paper is to further our understanding of how novel metaphor sentences are processed at a discourse level. Previous studies have focused on contextual issues during the processing of sentences containing conventional metaphors, with the effect of context on sentences with novel metaphors less studied. Accordingly, we determined the...
Chapter
This chapter interrogates the translated language used in development aid in terms of its underlying Anglocentric conceptual assumptions as well as in terms of its discursive products. It argues that this export of jargon-specific language has impeded the mission of developmental aid, and it provides a case study to support these arguments. It then...
Article
This article broadens Schneider's (2018) proposal relating to finding culture in corpora by examining keyness, conceptual frames, and metaphorical signals in newspaper editorials in two varieties of world Englishes: Chinese and American English. These editorials focus on opinion articles and commentaries about territorial issues in the South China...
Article
Full-text available
This paper adopts models from epidemiology to account for the development and decline of neologisms based on internet usage. The research design focuses on the issue of whether a host-driven epidemic model is well-suited to explain human behavior regarding neologisms. We extracted the search frequency data from Google Trends that covers the ninety...
Article
Diachronic studies on metaphor use in public discourse have primarily focused on Inner Circle English and European languages. However, the usage patterns of specific metaphorical frames over time is universal or cultural-specific remains underexplored. This article investigates the diachronic changes of economic metaphors focusing on the concept of...
Chapter
Conceptual metaphors invoking the source domain of building are oft en found in political speeches to promote long-term commitment to social goals ( Charteris-Black 2004 ). In this chapter, we look for evidence that use of metaphors relying on the source domain of building may vary between two groups of political leaders in Hong Kong: the British G...
Chapter
Conceptual metaphors invoking the source domain of building are oft en found in political speeches to promote long-term commitment to social goals ( Charteris-Black 2004 ). In this chapter, we look for evidence that use of metaphors relying on the source domain of building may vary between two groups of political leaders in Hong Kong: the British G...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Linguistic synesthesia is the cross-linguistic usage of lexical items used in one sensory modality to describe perceptions in another (Ullmann 1957; Williams 1976; Viberg 1983). Examples include sweet voice in English and 暖色 nuan3 se4 "warm color" in Mandarin. There are three different assumptions on the nature of linguistic synesthesia, including...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper reports a linguistically-enriched method of detecting token-level metaphors for the second shared task on Metaphor Detection. We participate in all four phases of competition with both datasets, i.e. Verbs and All-POS on the VUA and the TOFEL datasets. We use the modality exclusivity and embodiment norms for constructing a conceptual rep...
Article
Full-text available
The rising prominence of women in politics has sparked a growing interest in comparing the language of male and female politicians. Many researchers have explored whether gender in politics has had an impact on their metaphor styles. While these studies have been oriented qualitatively and have concentrated on the two-way interaction between metaph...
Article
Full-text available
The literature provides diverging perspectives on the universality and stability of economic metaphors over time. This article contains a diachronic analysis of economic metaphors describing trade in a corpus of 225 years of US State of the Union addresses (1790–2014). We focused on two types of change: (i) replacement of a source domain by another...
Article
Source domain verification has not received as much attention as criteria for metaphor identification in the study of conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we provide a replicable approach to source domain verification which we hope will provide a foundation for new approaches to this important question. We adopt an empirical method extended from pre...
Article
Full-text available
The rising prominence of women in politics has sparked a growing interest in comparing the language of male and female politicians. Many researchers have explored whether gender in politics has had an impact on their metaphor styles. While these studies have been oriented qualitatively and have concentrated on the two-way interaction between metaph...
Article
In this paper, we analyze the clitic YUM (< ‘thing’) in Khalkha Mongolian which, in different syntactic contexts, reinforces assertiveness or expresses different shades of presumption or presupposition. The former holds for declaratives where the presence of YUM conveys the speaker’s strong subjective commitment. In question clauses, YUM is used to...
Article
This paper examines the mapping directionality tendencies of linguistic synesthesia in Mandarin using a corpus-based approach. Based on this set of less-studied data, we find that Mandarin synesthesia does not share the same directionality tendencies with linguistic synesthesia in Indo-European languages, which challenges the assumed cross-linguist...
Data
This is the poster of our team (PolyU_CBS-CAF)'s work at the FinSBD shared task, which has just been presented at the FinNLP workshop (in conjunction with IJCAI19) at Macao on 12 August 2019. Thanks for the people being interested in our method and exchanged a few good ideas in completing the task. For any people who wants to have more knowledge ab...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Sentence Boundary Detection is a basic requirement in Natural Language Processing and remains a challenge to language processing for specific purposes especially with noisy source documents. In this paper, we deal with the processing of scanned financial prospectuses with a feature-oriented and knowledge-enriched approach. Feature engineering and k...
Article
This article explores the linguistic features of different registers in Chinese through text clustering driven by the Menzerath–Altmann (MA) law. We propose to calculate the average word length distribution according to clause length. The MA law predicts that texts from different registers will show differences in terms of average word length distr...
Conference Paper
This article analyzes how a referendum is represented through the use of conceptual metaphors in two major newspapers in Taiwan, the Liberty Times and the United Daily News. The analysis indicates that a general schema for the referendum a causer causes an object to move or stop, which is further divided to the forward-moving and stopping sub-schem...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter is the Chinese translation of the following paper Translated by Jiajuan XIONG and Jing DING Huang, Chu-Ren and Kathleen Ahrens. 2003. Individuals, kinds and events: classifier coercion of nouns. Language Sciences. 25(4). 353-373. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(02)00021-9
Chapter
This chapter examines how expatriate residents conceptualize Hong Kong through metaphorical source domains. By first exploring how people compare two contrasting concepts, this chapter attempts to elicit explicit comparisons of Hong Kong that can be used to understand the role of metaphorical comparison in understanding. While it can be seen that t...
Chapter
Previous studies have sought to use lexical frequency patterns as a way of understanding conceptual models of political ideology. Ahrens (2011) and Ahrens and Lee (2009), in particular, have looked at the lexical frequency patterns in U.S. Senatorial speeches and Presidential speeches and argued that these patterns provide evidence for Lakoff’s (20...
Chapter
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Chapter
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Conference Paper
The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which mappings vary according to ideology by analyzing the conceptual metaphors found in the source domain of war in the annual addresses of two groups of politicians: three Hong Kong Governors (1984-1996) and three Hong Kong Chief Executives (1997-2015). These two groups are hypothesized to have v...
Conference Paper
Issues in multimodality, including conceptual metaphor analysis, are have been examined within the genres of advertisements, comics, music, speeches (with associated gestures), film and television, and video games. Less attention has been paid to the visual and verbal conceptual metaphors found in picturebooks. However, picturebooks, especially tho...
Chapter
Full-text available
Conference Paper
The last decade has witnessed a growth of research on conceptual metaphors in political discourse. This can be classified in terms of authors of the texts and types of source/ target domains being used for analysis. For example, Lu and Ahrens (2008) studied conceptual metaphors with one particular source domain (BUILDING) from Taiwanese presidents,...
Article
Full-text available
Decades of lexical ambiguity research has rigorously studied effects of relative sense frequency on sense disambiguation in biased contexts, while fundamental semantic issues such as distinction of different types of ambiguities, or influences from lexical meanings' semantic nature (e.g., literal or metaphorical) as well as these meanings' degrees...
Conference Paper
Political speeches are full of conventionalized conceptual metaphor use (Charteris-Black 2004, Ahrens 2009). When these speeches are translated, the conceptual metaphors may undergo changes between the source and target text. Stienstra (1993) argues that there are three different conceptual metaphors (CM) types for the purposes of translation: univ...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the use of words and phrases that signal metaphors in three genres in order to further examine the corpus-based evidence for signaling variation mentioned in previous research. While previous studies have focused on pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and the level of conventionalization, this study demonstrates that the c...
Conference Paper
This paper examines to what extent conceptual models reflecting political points of view can be determined from lexical frequency patterns in political speeches. Following on Ahrens’ (2011) study on lexical frequency patterns in American presidential speeches which proposes that Republican and Democratic presidents do, by and large, use lexical ite...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter provides an overview of psycholinguistic research on semantic processing in Chinese. In terms of word-level processing, research has demonstrated that nouns with more meanings are accessed faster than nouns with fewer meanings, pointing to a random-access model of lexical access. In addition, cross-modal reaction time experiments have...
Conference Paper
One issue in the study of political discourse is how to identify ideology in text. And one way to structure the ideological contrast between a hard-lined and less threatening language is to use Lakoff’s (1996/2002) Strict Father (SF) Model and Nurturant Parent (NP) Model, where morality is either understood as strength and authority, or nurturance...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor heralded a whole generation of research by positing that metaphor is used because we refer to concrete and familiar object to explain abstract and potentially novel ideas. Ensuing research, picking up the two strands, can be largely classified as those focusing on embodiment (i.e. referring to familiar objects) o...
Article
Full-text available
Ontologies and Conceptual Metaphors in English and Mandarin Previous studies on the teaching and learning of economic metaphors often emphasize the similarities and differences cross-linguistically. Few have looked at the reasons why different conceptual metaphor terms are used in two languages. One may even find it hard to pinpoint why some metap...
Article
Full-text available
Problem statement: Theories of language processing rely upon experimental evidence to support or reject their hypotheses. Yet it is often the case that conflicting theories flourish alongside each other for decades, with voluminous experimental evidence to support their respective hypotheses. Approach: In this study, I suggest it is imperative for...
Article
Full-text available
Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) is a theory of the representation of verbal semantics that is based on Mandarin Chinese data. In the MARVS theory, there are two different types of modules: Event Structure Modules and Role Modules. There are also two sets of attributes: Event-Internal Attributes and Role-Internal Attribut...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Sentiment and emotion analysis have been traditionally established as independent research topics in NLP. Although they are two important aspects of subjective information and are closely related, there have been few attempts to combine the two analyses. As a preliminary attempt, we integrate emotion information into sentiment analysis by employing...
Article
Full-text available
Writers and illustrators for children have a worldwide organisation they can turn to in order to help them improve their craft, provide networking opportunities, and promote their interests regarding copyrights and contracts. The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has over 20,000 members worldwide in over 70 chapters around...
Article
Full-text available
In this study, we propose to use two corpus-driven linguistic approaches for a sense prediction study. We will concentrate on the character similarity clustering approach and concept similarity clustering approach to predict the senses of non-assigned words by using corpora and tools, such as Chinese Gigaword Corpus, and HowNet. In this study, we w...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Module-Attribute Representation of Verbal Semantics (MARVS) is a theory of the representation of verbal semantics that is based on Mandarin Chinese data (Huang et al. 2000). In the MARVS theory, there are two different types of modules: Event Structure Modules and Role Modules. There are also two sets of attributes: Event-Internal Attributes and Ro...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigates whether prior knowledge affects the processing of vague discourse in Mandarin Chinese. Vague discourse refers to the texts using vague references and neutral descriptors (e.g. 東西 d&omacr;ngx&imacr; "thing", 事情 shìqíng "item", and 物件 wùjiàn "object"), rather than naming the referred to items at the basic level. Three conditio...
Chapter
Full-text available
Research on conceptual metaphors, to date, has focused on identifying linguistic metaphors in order to better understand the underlying conceptual paradigm implicit in the use of these metaphors. However, this approach runs into problems when metaphor identification fails. This paper suggests that an alternate approach may be taken: namely, the ide...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this study, we propose to use two corpus-based linguistic approaches for a sense prediction study. We will concentrate on the character similarity clustering approach and concept similarity clustering approach to predict the senses of non-assigned words by using corpora and tools, such as Chinese Gigaword Corpus, and HowNet. In this study, we wo...
Chapter
Full-text available
Issues surrounding novel metaphor comprehension re not well understood. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes the Conceptual Mapping Model, which puts forward the idea that examining the linguistic mappings found in a particular source-target domain pairing allows hypotheses to be formulated regarding the underlying reason for this...
Conference Paper
This study examines the use of words and phrases that signal metaphors in three genres in order to further examine the corpus-based evidence for signaling variation mentioned in previous research. While previous studies have focused on pragmatic functions, discourse functions and the level of conventionalization, this study demonstrates that the co...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Theories of language processing rely upon experimental evidence to support or disprove their hypotheses. Yet it is often the case that conflicting theories flourish alongside each other for decades, with voluminous experimental evidence to support their respective hypotheses. In this paper, I suggest it is imperative for researchers to move beyond...
Article
Full-text available
This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this study, we would like to explore all possible senses of lexical ambiguity in Mandarin Chinese in order to deal with the undefined sense prediction study and to bring about more appropriate lexical ambiguity resolutions. We propose to use corpus-driven linguistic approaches for a sense prediction study. We will concentrate on individual sema...
Conference Paper
Corpus-based frequency has long been an important factor in psycholinguistics. And how relative meaning frequency can be determined is particularly crucial for study of lexical ambiguity. For example, in examining activation of the two meanings of bank (financial institution vs. riverbank) in biased contexts, one must seek clear criteria to determi...

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