Metaphorical Language Change Is Self-Organized Criticality

TL;DR

This paper models metaphorical language change as a self-organized criticality process, using fractal and power-law analyses to explain how metaphors evolve within complex language systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework viewing metaphorical language change as a self-organized criticality phenomenon, supported by statistical analysis of Chinese verb metaphors.

Findings

Metaphorical expressions form fractals with spatio-temporal correlations.

Metaphor change follows a power-law distribution.

Long-range dependencies influence metaphorical evolution.

Abstract

One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as complex systems and the dynamic view of metaphor, this paper argues that metaphorical language change qualifies as a self-organized criticality state and the linguistic expressions of a metaphor can be profiled as a fractal with spatio-temporal correlations. Synchronously, these metaphorical expressions self-organize into a self-similar, scale-invariant fractal that follows a power-law distribution; temporally, long range inter-dependence constrains the self-organization process by the way of transformation rules that are intrinsic of a language system. This argument is verified in the paper with statistical analyses of twelve randomly selected Chinese verb metaphors in a large-scale diachronic corpus.