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A corpus-assisted metaphor analysis in portraying businesswomen: Diachronic changes in Hong Kong English news

Paper · 2025 · Yifan Li, Yanlin Li and Kathleen Ahrens

Summary

The paper looks at how metaphor shaped the image of businesswomen in Hong Kong English-language press during the twenty years before the 1997 handover. This period saw a sharp rise in women's labour participation and management roles. Most earlier metaphor work on businesswomen studied mainstream Anglophone outlets, so this study targets an outer-circle variety. The authors built a small diachronic corpus from the South China Morning Post with two sub-corpora: 1978–1987 and 1988–1997. They then applied critical metaphor analysis in three stages: identification, interpretation and explanation. Metaphor identification followed MIPVU, and source domains were checked against SUMO, WordNet and dictionaries. Both decades show a similar source-domain profile, led by COMPETITION, JOURNEY, MACHINE, BUILDING and PHYSICAL OBJECT. The earlier decade has more metaphors, while the later one draws on a wider range of domains. The coverage is broadly positive. It blends traditionally masculine traits such as ambition and competence with feminine ones such as care and rescue. The work extends metaphor-based discourse analysis to Hong Kong English and to how news coverage tracks social change.

Key points

  • Data come from the South China Morning Post via the ProQuest Historical Newspaper Database. Articles were found by keyword search (e.g., "businesswoman", "female executive", "woman entrepreneur") and then manually reviewed. Each sub-corpus contains 20 articles.
  • Corpus sizes are 18,358 words for 1978–1987 and 12,041 words for 1988–1997, giving 30,399 words in total. The authors acknowledge this is small compared with similar studies.
  • The method combines Charteris-Black's critical metaphor analysis with MIPVU for identification. Source domains were verified following Ahrens and Jiang (2020) using SUMO, WordNet and the Longman dictionary, and AntConc was used for concordance searches.
  • The dominant domains in both periods are COMPETITION, JOURNEY, MACHINE, BUILDING and PHYSICAL OBJECT. ANIMAL, PLANT and PERSON domains foreground femininity, for example in WOMEN ARE RESCUERS and the GARDENER framing.
  • Direct metaphors tend to report individual achievements. Indirect ones tend to describe the social conditions women faced, such as the lack of maternity protection and family burden, and the two types complement each other.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Source domains are confirmed against an upper ontology (SUMO) plus WordNet and dictionaries rather than intuition alone, which makes the domain labels checkable and reproducible.
  • I2. MIPVU-style identification contrasts a word's contextual meaning with its more basic sense and marks the word as metaphorical when the two belong to different domains.
  • I3. Change over time is measured in two ways: raw metaphor frequency and diversity of source domains, which moved in opposite directions here.
  • I4. The authors openly note that gender-marked keyword retrieval misses relevant texts that lack such markers, treating corpus construction as a recall risk.
  • I5. Direct metaphors (achievements) and indirect metaphors (social context) are read together as complementary layers of one portrayal.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Mova's WordNet-backed ontology could assign each predicate's basic sense to a top-level domain, so a figurative use can be explained as a mapping from domain A to domain B.
  • I2 (frames): when a VerbNet role's selectional restriction is violated (e.g., a company "rescued" or a woman "reaping"), prag could tag the frame as non-literal instead of building a wrong literal event.
  • I3 (learn): evaluation reports on period- or genre-split data could track both error counts and the spread of error types, since one metric alone can hide a shift.
  • I4 (learn): when silver data are mined by keyword, a small manually reviewed sample outside the keyword hits could serve as a check on what retrieval misses.
  • I5 (world): the text world could keep figurative statements about the setting (e.g., Hong Kong as a "springboard") as separate context facts linked to the entities they frame.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 222 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Yifan Li, Yanlin Li and Kathleen Ahrens. 2025. A corpus-assisted metaphor analysis in portraying businesswomen: Diachronic changes in Hong Kong English news. Proceedings of the 39th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{li2025corpus,
  title = {{A corpus-assisted metaphor analysis in portraying businesswomen: Diachronic changes in Hong Kong English news}},
  author = {Yifan Li, Yanlin Li and Kathleen Ahrens},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.paclic-1.22/}
}

References

23 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Kathleen Ahrens and Menghan Jiang. 2020. Source domain verification using corpus-based tools. Metaphor and Symbol, 35(1):43–55. find
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