Metaphorical Language Change Is Self-Organized Criticality
This addresses the actuation problem in linguistics for researchers studying language evolution, but it is incremental as it applies existing complex systems theory to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding metaphorical language change by proposing that it exhibits self-organized criticality, with linguistic expressions forming fractals following power-law distributions, and supports this with statistical analyses of twelve Chinese verb metaphors in a diachronic corpus.
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.