The Conceptualization of the Notion of ju 'Sentence" in Traditional Chinese Linguistics

Among the semantic domains to which Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has been applied in the research by cognitivists since the 1980s, language has been the object of several studies (see Reddy 1979, Sweetser 1992, Grady 1998, but also Haugen 1971). A number of them are directly concerned with the metaphors for sentence and its structure, i.e. grammar (see Mittelberg 2002, Woodard 2014). These studies prove useful to attempt a hypothesis on the conceptual metaphors behind the linguistic notion of SENTENCE. Considering that the most frequent conceptual metaphors in CMT literature are SENTENCE IS A CONTAINER, SENTENCE IS A BUILDING and SENTENCE IS A TREE, here it is proposed that the primary metaphors lying beneath these conceptual metaphors are CONSTITUENTS ARE CONTENTS and ORGANIZATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE. For this study, the notion of JU ‘sentence’ was investigated in one of the most influential texts of traditional Chinese linguistics, the Wenxin diaolong (501 AD), in order to find the metaphors employed therein. It turned out that the primary metaphors of CONTENT and PHYSICAL STRUCTURE are employed in this text too; yet another primary metaphor is present: SENTENCE IS A VERTICAL PATH, based on the image-schema of the PATH.