1. Introduction

In China, the moon represents a rich cultural connotation and is something that often appears in ancient literary works. The moon is rich in imagery, and poets have expressed their emotions via this typical imagery. Thus, studying the imagery of the moon and understanding how poets used it to express their emotions is important for a deeper understanding of poetry and the emotions of the Chinese people. As a result, moon imagery has received much attention in literary studies. In previous studies, scholars have typically used conceptual metaphors to study moon imagery from cultural and historical perspectives [1]. Contrary to previous approaches, this study selected The Complete Song Cis as the corpus, took a random sample from the corpus that contained the character “moon” (月) in the poetry lines, and used conceptual metaphor theory to analyse whether the different emotions expressed by the poets when composing their poems are related to the changing dynasties experienced by the poets. The study found that the different emotions expressed by the poets when composing their poems might not be related to the changing dynasties and that there were more negative emotions than positive and neutral emotions. In addition, the author found that poets often used the technique of “writing sorrows with beautiful scenery” and that there were more poems expressing private emotions but fewer poems expressing public concerns.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Moon imagery in Chinese literature

In China, the moon has never been an ordinary satellite. Chinese clan religions, myths and legends, poems and songs, and folk customs have endowed it with profound cultural connotations. The moon rises and falls, brightens and fades, and each image is related to the inheritance of the human spirit and destiny, including the sadness and joy of our ancestors. The moon plays an important role in ancient Chinese poetry and writing, and has received much attention in literary studies. For example, Shi studied the imagery of moon from many perspectives [1]. First, she approached the moon legends from the cultural point of view, and analysed its alias and its related festivals. Second, through literature review, the author systematically sorted out the origin and development of moon-related literature, and focused on the development of moon poems in Tang and Song dynasties. Thirdly, with the examples from Tang and Song poems, she analysed the themes and main artistic characteristics of moon poems in Tang and Song dynasties, and summarised the main characteristics during these periods. Finally, the Tang and Song moon poems were placed in the history of literature to locate its value and position. Using the similar approach by analysing cultural background, Xu chose individual “moon” forms - waning moon and autumn moon - and drew the conclusions based on the poets’ emotions and the historical background of their creation [2].

Because the moon is eternal and beautiful, ancient poets always placed their emotions within this imagery, and thus produced many moving works, which expressed various emotions such as nostalgia, family, friendship, love, and leisure. Therefore, the image of the moon is of great significance in the poetry. As an important image, “moon” has been studied by many scholars. For example, according to Chen’s study, the moon is the messenger of love; the bond of nostalgia, kinship, friendship and family; the sustenance of noble aspirations; the witness of history; the creator of beautiful situations [3]. Qin explained the moon in the farewell poetry imagery for the departure. The moon in the subjugation works represents the historical change; in love poems the moon is the symbol of love; in the poem of missing the moon represents loneliness; in the poems expressing the girl’s sorrow, the moon, as a combination of imaginary and real images, is often combined with the image of “dream” to express the girl’s confusion. In the poems, the moon symbolises a pure and beautiful woman. The author used the moon to expound his philosophical view [4].

Apart from imagery analysis, many scholars have examined the use of moon imagery from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson [5]. For example, Song analysed the conceptual metaphor of the moon in the poems, in order to explore the inner feelings and life experience of ancient poets. According to the type of target domain, which is the theme of the poem, all conceptual metaphors were divided into three categories: philosophical conceptual metaphor, intellectual conceptual metaphor and emotional conceptual metaphor. First of all, “philosophical conceptual metaphor” is to use the cycle of the moon, or to map the development and change of things, or personal behavior, or youth time, etc. Understanding the universe or life through the changes of the four seasons is a philosophical feeling. The second is the “conceptual metaphor of the moon”, which reflects the poets’ own personalities and ambitions through the ebb and flow of the moon. Thirdly, in the “emotion conceptual metaphor”, the emotion types include homesickness, friendship, love, homesickness and separation, which can directly or indirectly reveal the poets’ various emotions prompted by the different phases and colors of the moon [6]. The current study also uses conceptual metaphor theory to study the moon imagery in Song Cis.

2.2. Conceptual Metaphor Theory

According to Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson defined metaphor as: “the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience a certain kind of thing through another kind of thing.” [5] It is to understand, think, and perceive abstract, difficult concepts with familiar, concrete concepts by mapping the structure of the source domain to the target domain. Generally speaking, the source domain is more concrete, while the target domain is more abstract. The mapping is a systematic, partial, asymmetric mapping from the source domain to the target domain.

In the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor, metaphor is a universal way to express thoughts in people’s daily life. It exists not only in language, but also in thoughts and behaviours. Metaphor is regarded as a basic cognitive process for people to talk or think about abstract things. It is precisely because conceptual metaphor exists in our conceptual system that metaphorical expression exists in language. According to the different source domains, Lakoff and Johnson divide conceptual metaphor into three categories: structural metaphor, orientation metaphor and ontological metaphor [5].

Structural metaphor is to construct another concept with ambiguous structure, ambiguous definition or complete lack of internal structure through a clearly structured and clearly defined concept. The cognitive domains of these two structures are different, but their structures remain unchanged, that is, there is a regular correspondence between their constituent components.

Orientation metaphors are metaphors that organise one conceptual system with reference to another, because most of them are related to spatial positions: up and down, inside and out, front and back, open and close, deep and shallow, and central and marginal. Because we are in a physical environment, spatial orientation arises. People project these concrete concepts onto abstract concepts such as mood, physical condition, quantity, and social status. For example, happiness is up, while sadness is down; more is up, while less is down; the more important position is up, while the less important position is down. These metaphorical concepts and their corresponding languages are not arbitrary but based on material or cultural experiences.

The ontological metaphor is concerned with the original way of human existence that is material, human experience of objects for us to express abstract concepts. The most typical and representative ontological metaphor is the container metaphor. Each person is a vessel, with a distinction between inside and outside. People project this concept to other objects than the human body, such as houses, jungles, fields, areas, etc., and even treat some intangible and abstract events, actions, activities, and states as a container, such as into view, on the field, fall in love, etc.

Song used conceptual metaphors in cognitive linguistics to draw the conclusion that cognitive metaphors are universal and that cognitive linguistics can be used to interpret classical poetry by taking ancient Chinese literary works as corpus [6]. What’s more, in Shi’s study of Li Bai’s moon poems, eight ontological metaphors, eight structural metaphors and two orientational metaphors are identified within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory [1].

This paper draws on the structural, directional and ontological metaphors of conceptual metaphor to analyse the emotions expressed in Song Cis written in different dynasties (see Table 1 for details) and the lexical and grammatical usage to express these feelings. Specifically, this paper attempts to answer the following three research questions:

Whether the emotions expressed via the imagery of moon are different in poems written in different dynasties?

What are the specific emotions expressed through the imagery of moon?

How conceptual metaphors are reflected in the poems?

3. Methods

3.1. Materials

The character月 (moon) was set as the search term in the Complete Anthology of Song Cis sub-corpus in the BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) to retrieve poems that contained the character. From the 8029 search results, three percent of the search results (n = 220) were randomly selected from the in BLCU Corpus Center (BCC). Some ineligible entries were excluded due to the following reasons:

1.月 that was used to express the meaning of “month” (n = 8);

2.月 that appeared only in the title of the poem (n = 32) and in the preamble (n = 5);

3.月 that appeared in incomplete Song Cis (n = 4);

4.月 that appeared in the Song Cis that did not conform to the composition rules (n = 1);

5.duplicate research result (n = 1);

Excluding these ineligible entries, a total of 169 entries were included in the subsequent coding and analysis.

3.2. Coding

First, the 169 entries were divided into three categories according to the emotions that these Cis expressed: positive emotion, neutral emotion and negative emotion. Within each category, the specific emotions such as nostalgia, kinship, and friendship were also coded. Second, these entries were categorised according to the time (specific dynasties) when they were written.

3.3. Analysis

The frequencies of three kinds of emotions that were expressed in the 169 Song Cis were cross-tabulated with the dynasties in which they were written. Chi-square tests were conducted to examine whether the three kinds of emotions were evenly distributed or not, and whether the emotions expressed in Song Cis were related to the dynasties in which they were composed. Following statistical analyses, the emotions expressed by the poets in the Song Cis about “Moon” were analysed by the theory of conceptual metaphor to examine how poets expressed their emotions via a range of lexical and grammatical features.

4. Results

From the statistical analyses, the emotions expressed in the Song Cis that were written during four dynasties under investigation were mainly negative emotions. From the qualitative research, the author found that adjectives were most frequently used in expressing negative, positive and neutral emotions.

4.1. Distributions of Different Emotions Across Different Dynasties

4.1.1. Overall Results of Emotions Distribution

From the initial 169 eligible entries, six Cis were further excluded due to unknown date of poem creation, resulting in a total of 163 Cis in the subsequent statistical analyses. There were 48 Song Cis expressing positive emotions, 21 neutral emotions and 94 negative emotions. These emotions were then further divided into the corresponding dynasties when those Cis were written, i.e., Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (A.D. 907-979), Northern Song (A.D. 960-1127), Southern Song (A.D. 1127-1279) and Yuan (A.D. 1271-1368).

Table 1: Distribution of different emotions in different dynasties.

From the table, it can be observed that the number of negative emotions was the highest compared with the other two emotions. During the three periods that saw a large number of Song Cis production (i.e., Northern Song, Northern Song to Southern Song, and Southern Song), the number of Cis that expressed negative emotions were twice as many as those that expressed positive emotions.

According to Table 2, among those Cis whose authors experienced change of dynasties, there were 16 Song Cis expressing positive emotions, 7 neutral emotions and 26 negative emotions. Among those Cis whose authors did not experience change of dynasties, there were 32 positive emotions, 13 neutral emotions and 68 negative emotions.

Table 2: The distribution of different emotions in the changing times.

A chi-square test of independence was conducted to examine whether there is a relationship between types of emotions and dynasties with/without change. There was no statistically significant relationship between types of emotions and dynasties, χ2(2) = .729, p = .695. The results showed that emotions were not affected by the change of dynasties. The negative emotions were almost twice as much as the positive emotions, regardless of the dynasties in which the Song Cis were written.

For those poets who did not experience dynasty change, two separate chi-square goodness of fit tests were conducted to examine whether the three kinds of emotions were evenly distributed. For those poets who spent their whole lives in the North Song Dynasty, there were 11 Song Cis expressing positive emotions, 3 neutral emotions and 22 negative emotions. There was a statistically significant result, χ2(2) = 15.167, p = .0005, indicating that the emotions were not equally distributed. The negative emotions were twice as much as the positive emotions. For those poets who spent their whole lives in the North Song Dynasty, there were 21 positive emotions, 10 neutral emotions and 46 negative emotions. There was also a statistically significant difference in the distribution of emotions, χ2(2) = 26.519, p < .0001, indicating that the emotions were not equally distributed. The negative emotions were twice as much as the positive emotions.

For those poets who experienced dynasty change, one inferential statistical test and two descriptive analyses were conducted. From the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms to the Northern Song Dynasty, there were 0 positive emotion, 0 neutral emotion and 1 negative emotion. Since there were a limited number of poems that were selected, no statistical test was conducted. Among those Cis whose authors experienced change from North Song Dynasty to South Song Dynasty, there were 11 positive emotions, 5 neutral emotions and 18 negative emotions. There was a statistically significant result, χ2(2) = 7.471, p = .024, indicating that the emotions were not equally distributed. The number of the Cis that expressed negative emotions was approximately twice as that of positive emotions. From the Southern Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, there were 5 positive emotions, 2 neutral emotions and 7 negative emotions. There were a limited number of poems that were selected, so no statistical test was conducted.

4.2. Specific Emotions Expressed in Song Cis

Detailed analysis of emotions expressed in 163 Cis was conducted to examine which specific emotions were most commonly expressed by poets. Table 3 shows the most frequent specific emotions under each of the three broad categories (i.e., positive, neutral and negative emotions).

Table 3: Classification of three emotions.

It can be observed that the sub-category “Leisure” was used most frequently in positive emotions. In addition, the sub-category “Fantasy Wonderland” was used most frequently in neutral emotions, while the sub-category “Missing” is used the most in negative emotions.

4.3. Lexico-Grammatical Analysis of 月 (Moon)

To examine how the character 月 (moons) is linguistically used with other words of different parts-of-speech, lexico-grammatical analysis was conducted to investigate the most common co-occurrences of 月 in Cis that expressed different emotions. To select the lexico-grammatical features that are closely related with 月, only those characters that appeared within the range of three characters preceding and following the target character 月 were included in the analysis.

4.3.1. Negative Emotions

In Table 4, according to different parts of speech, the parts of speech with high frequency and the words used in them are extracted. Among the nouns, “person” accounted for the most, while “Mountain” accounted for the least. Among the adjectives, “Bright” accounted for the most.

Table 4: Common co-occurrences of 月 in Cis that expressed negative emotions.

Note. The examples listed in this table follow the format of original Chinese character, its translated meaning, frequency, and percentage. For instance, 弄 was the most frequently used verb of 月, and the meaning of this verb can be translated as “enjoy”. It appeared twice, and its percentage is calculated by dividing the frequency by the total number of verbs that appeared within ± three positions of 月 in the Cis that expressed negative emotions.

The author made an interesting finding that the words that seemed to express positive emotions appeared more in the Cis expressing negative emotions. These words were often used when poets described beautiful scenery, but to foil their negative emotions. These adjectives were analysed in details in the following section.

The character 明 (Bright) was the adjective most frequently used to express negative emotions. It means to emit or reflect light rapidly or in large amounts or to have surprising colors, generally expressing positive emotions. There were four lines that used 明 to express missing, two to express parting, two to express loneliness and one to express memories. For example, in a Ci that expressed parting:

Don’t hate the water merciless, I not know where my boat will stay on the next bright moon night.

莫怨无情流水，明月扁舟何处。《下水船·芳草青门路（贺铸）》

In another Ci that expressed missing:

Now we are thousands of miles away, can only think of the bright moon

如今千里，断魂空对明月。《念奴娇· 片帆暮落（曾纡）》

The character 新 (new) was the second most common adjective used to express negative emotions. It expressed different emotions in different Cis. There were two lines to express missing and one to express gloom.

For example,

Want to go to enjoy the plum blossom, but has not opened yet, the heart has said endless spring sorrow .……Write a line of poetry, looked up to see such as the hook of the new moon.

问道梅花开也未，吟不尽，一春愁。（省略）诗罢一眉，新月又如钩。《江城子（韩㴲）》

Except for adjectives, the emotion of words in other parts of speech is the same as the emotion expressed in the Cis.

Verb: shine

The moon is shining on the little window. I can't sleep tonight.

小窗和月照无眠。《浣溪沙（洪咨夔）》

Noun: person

The moon and I (the person myself) climbed the south tower together.

人共月、同上南楼。《沙塞子·中秋无月（周紫芝）》

Pronoun: this

I haven't had a good moon for the last few years. Finally, I got one this night.

年时好月今宵见。《踏莎行·五月十三日月甚佳（张孝祥）》

Quantifier: one

Where is the one I miss? The moon shone on a curtain, as if on her haggard face.

人何在，一帘淡月，仿佛照颜色。《霓裳中序第一·亭皋正望极（姜夔）》

4.3.2. Positive Emotions

Among the adjectives, “Bright” accounted for the most, and “Wind” accounted for the most among nouns.

Table 5: A common part of speech in positive emotions.

For example,

Living up to the bright moon tonight, I roll up the curtain to enjoy the moonlight.

不负一天明月、卷帘看。《南歌子 （倪稱）》

Since words related to months were not included in the study. It would be interesting to look at how 年 (year) was used with “moon”. In this case, originally a noun, “year” is used as an adverbial.

Every year there is a soft breeze and bright moonlight, often regret that drinking can not enjoy.

风月年年，常恨酒杯窄。《醉落魄·生日自戏 （韩元吉）》

Here the part of speech for “year” changed from a noun to an adverb.

4.3.3. Neutral Emotions

Table 6: A common part of speech in neutral emotions.

(1) Bright

When everything is silent. I look at the moon in the middle of the night, feel open heart, like the calm water

正万籁都沈，月明中夜，心弥万里清如水。《哨遍·用前韵（辛弃疾）》

Cold

Here the Windows are bright and opened, there is no night, and the cold light shines all around, as if we were in the moon palace

八面玲珑光不夜，四围晃耀寒如月。《满江红·钧天高处（葛长庚）》

Cyan

Looking back, I saw a bright moon rising into the cyan sky.

回头转。一轮明月升苍弁。《渔家傲·浪静西溪澄似练（净端）》

4.4. Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Explanation

This section explains the previous findings from the lens of conceptual metaphors. The author has chosen several typical lines from the selected Cis to analyse from the perspectives of structural metaphor, orientation metaphor and ontological metaphor.

4.4.1. Structural Metaphor

In the following line:

The moon is autumn

“拟把鹤山月，换却鉴湖秋。” 《水调歌头·妇生朝李·同其女载酒为寿用韵谢之》魏了翁

the moon of Mountain Heshan is like Lake Jianhu in autumn. The source domain is the moon of Mountain Heshan, and the target domain is the autumn of Lake Jianhu. The poet found that the moon looked silent and cold, and then associated it with the silence lake of Jianhu and the cool of autumn, which were similar to the characteristics of the moon at this time, so he connected the moon with the autumn of Lake Jianhu.

Holding a moon-fan with a picture of a lover. Dust has accumulated on the fan because it has been idle for a long time.

“抱素影、明月空闲，早尘损丹青，楚山依约。” 《解连环·秋情》 吴文英

In the above line, the source domain is fan, and the target domain is moon. The poet found that the fan’s shape was round, the same shape as the moon at full moon, and connected the two things.

The poet, Wu Wenying, met a woman in Suzhou in his early years. According to many analyses made by Wu Ci, the expert concluded that he had a concubine in Suzhou, which was later sent away. However, the comparison of his words about the Suzhou affair shows that the woman was not his concubine but a geisha. Their love ended in tragedy. Wu Wenying’s affection for her is sincere and deep, and he often expresses endless sorrow in his Ci works in a covert fashion. This poem was written in the late period of the poet’s residence in Suzhou, after his love tragedy. Fully express the author's feelings of sorrow.

4.4.2. Orientation Metaphor

In the context of Chinese culture, being in a high place usually expresses the poet’s negative emotions such as sadness and loneliness. For example, in the following line:

The moon is reflected in the river below the Yueyang Tower. For whom does it shine its dreary light?

楼下凄凉江月、为谁明。《南歌子》李祁

The moon in the water originally represents the elusive artistic conception, and later mostly represents the illusory things, impossible wishes. Referring to the whole poem, the poet expresses his homesickness. The poet looks at the moon reflected in the water on the tall building, and thinks that the distant moon and the hometown he cannot go back to are illusory and unreachable for him. So, Unreal is far, and by inference, real is near.

4.4.3. Ontological Metaphor

Moon has varied emotions and motions, just like human being. The moon is originally a natural object without self-knowledge. In this line,

明月不谙离恨苦。斜光到晓穿朱户。《蝶恋花·槛菊愁烟兰泣露》晏殊

The moon does not know the pain of parting. It shines through my door until dawn.

the author treats the moon as a person who can talk to. The author complains that the moon does not understand the pain of parting. Here, the author used ontological metaphor to more powerfully express the protagonist’s melancholy caused by the parting, the sleepless night under the light of the moon. Now the moon is human being with self-conscious. The moon has human movements and understands human emotions.

4.4.4. Container Metaphor

Container metaphor is a kind of ontological metaphor, which is explained separately in order to distinguish clearly. In this line,

明月一襟归思。《双瑞莲》赵以夫

The moon is full of thoughts of my return.

the author takes the moon as a container, puts the idea of going back into the moon, and imagines the invisible idea.

5. Discussion

From the corpus-based analysis from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the author found that most of the poets in Song dynasty expressed negative emotions, and they used adjectives to express such emotions. In addition, the author finds that dynastic change is not a decisive factor in poets’ frequent expression of negative emotions.

5.1. Highest Proportion of Negative Emotions

Firstly, from a social basis, An believes that the social function of poetry is mainly to express the social meaning of injustice, and that the grievance advocated in ancient Chinese poetics also has a strong political connotation and critical spirit. When they experienced love and hate, social changes and even the wounds of the times, they would use poetry to complain [7].

Secondly, from literary creation, Han yu (韩愈) considers that the poetry of the peaceful times is shallow, but the literature of sadness is profound; it is difficult to write a good essay expressing joy, but a painful work is easy to succeed [8]. Thus, literary creations often came from people who were wandering in foreign lands and living in seclusion in the mountains. As for the aristocrats, they had high rank and wealth, and they were not good at writing but loved poetry, but they did not have the perseverance to study it.

5.2. Writing Sorrow with Beautiful Scenery

Program listing or program commands in text should be set in typewriter form such as Courier New. While analysing the emotions expressed in poetry, the author found a common writing technique called “writing sorrow with beautiful scenery” in poetry works. This technique means that the poet writes about beautiful scenes to foil negative emotions. For instance,

The moonlight tonight. It is sad to see the river carrying away the fallen flowers. It is different now. The scenery in the south is picturesque painting, with maple and oak leaves seemed to dance down. I feel lonely every time I hear someone singing a melodious song. ……

今宵月色。叹暗水流花，年事非昨。潇洒江南似画，舞枫飘柞。谁家又唱江南曲，一番听、一番离索。……《桂枝香》柴望

The author begins by describing the time and circumstances of his creation: the moon is shining tonight. Since it is autumn and plants are changing according to the laws of nature, the author laments the loss of time. At this moment, the reader would think that the author might express the sad autumn emotion. However, the author immediately wrote that “at this time, the scenery of the south is like a painting” and then gave the example of the change of two typical plants in autumn, describing the beautiful fall of maple and oak trees. Readers are brought to the south by the author at this time, but also with the author lamenting the beauty of autumn scenery. He then describes it by ear: I hear someone singing a southern song, but every time I hear it I feel sad. At this point the overall sentiment of the poem becomes negative again. Generally speaking, the author’s description of the “autumn scene” exemplifies the technique of “writing sorrow with beautiful scenery”. The author uses autumn scenery to set off his sadness at this time, paving the way for the expression of negative emotion in the second part.

5.3. More Cis that Expressed Private Emotions rather than Public Concerns

Shen believes that this is related to the economic development of the society at the time. The Song dynasty was an economically prosperous dynasty, and its prosperity was a product of social and economic changes. It had undergone the accumulation of political, economic and cultural experiences of the previous dynasties, forming a relatively mature and civilised society where the emotional needs of society had shifted from communal to individual emotions. At the same time, during the Song dynasty, national emotions shifted from unity to division, with internal national emotions merging and external national emotions confronting the diverse emotional structures that drove the development of education, the commodity economy and technological innovation [9].

5.4. Limitations

Despite some interesting findings, there are some limitations in the current study. First, this study only randomly selected a small portion of the corpus. A larger number of Cis could be selected to form a more comprehensive representation of Song Cis that are included in detailed analysis. Second, it is a challenge for researchers to judge the emotion of poetry. Researchers must judge the poet’s writing background and also need to understand the poet’s characteristic and personality. But human emotions are complex, and these two points alone are not enough to judge a precise emotion.

Though with some limitations, this study is innovative in that it attempted to apply conceptual metaphor to analyse the imagery of “moon” in Song Cis, with detailed linguistic analysis to reveal the connection between lexico-grammatical features and emotions expressed in Cis. This paper analysed the distribution of the different emotions expressed by the poets using chi-square tests, and the poems are analysed using conceptual metaphor theory and imagery, drawing a conclusion that the emotions expressed by the poet may be independent of the period.

6. Conclusion

This paper applied Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor and, on the basis of this theory, analyses the emotions and deeper meanings expressed by poets in poems about the “moon” and whether changes in dynasties affect the poets’ creative emotions [5]. This paper examines the conceptual metaphor theory in relation to the imagery of the “moon”, and concludes that the different emotions expressed by the poets are not related to the changing times. Secondly, this study uses the corpus of The Complete Anthology of Song Cis to demonstrate the universality of conceptual metaphor. Metaphor is ubiquitous and plays an important role in human understanding of the abstract and the objective world, and its formation is based on human experience.

This paper has significant implications. The author selected the subjects of the study by random sampling, which included verses by unknown authors, so the study is more comprehensive and integrated than previous studies which only analyse Song Cis that were written by well-known poets. In addition, the combination of cognitive linguistics and corpus has some accuracy. The frequency of various types of structures (e.g., words, phrases, syntactic structures, semantic structures) were coded and counted to form the basis of subsequent qualitative analysis and interpretation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. These corpus-based frequency data avoid the pitfalls of introspective reasoning based on the intuition of the researcher.