A Cognitive Study on the Semantic Extensions of GOLD in English

Abstract

Based on the British National Corpus (BNC), this study attempts to analyze the contexts with gold and gold-relevant words. The corpus-based analysis of the contexts shows that the main meaning focuses of GOLD are: Color; Value; Rarity and Stability. The target scopes of GOLD include: Human, Animal, Object, Star, Plant, Place, Sport, Economy, Occupation, Music, Time, Chance, Rules and Ideas. The relationships between the source focuses and the target scopes fall into two levels: types and tendency. The types of relationships are metonymy, metaphor. The tendency shows the application tendency of the source focuses onto the targets. Color tends to describe Stars, Places, Objects, Plants, Animals and Human. Rarity and Value tend to describe Places, Plants, Sports, Economy, Time, Idea and Rules. Stability tends to describe Human, Occupation, Economy and Rules.