Ontologies and conceptual metaphors in English and Mandarin

Previous studies on the teaching and learning of economic metaphors often emphasize the similarities and differences cross-linguistically. Few have looked at the reasons why different conceptual metaphor terms are used in two languages. One may even find it hard to pinpoint why some metaphors are interpreted as similar or different forms in a different language. This becomes more difficult for natural language understanding where representations of human language are made for machine to process. This paper demonstrates a methodology copable of outlining the conceptual motivations that may have caused the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors used in different cultures. These motivations are the underlying reasons that show the shared or differing conceptual systems which were discovered through using an upper ontology ( i. e. ,the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO) . This paper exemplifies the use of this methodology in Mandarin and English data. The results provide expla-nation as to why certain conceptual metaphors cause more difficulty to Mandarin-English learners,and vice versa.