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Author/s Siaw-Fong Chung F.Y. August Chao Tien-Yu Lan Yen-Yu Lin National Chengchi University, Taiwan ABSTRACT This paper investigates twenty-two prepositions in two different lexical bundles – [PREPOSITION the NOUN of] (at the point of, from the perspective of, etc.) and [VERB PREPOSITION the NOUN of] (shouted above the noise of, suffering from the effects of, etc.), the only difference being that the former does not include the head verb that is present in the latter. Strings of constructions were extracted from the British National Corpus and the types of possible verbs, prepositions, and nouns in each possible combination were analyzed. The paper also details an experiment in which the types of nouns under each of the twenty-two prepositions were coded by human subjects in terms of their semantic features. Finally, a computer program was also utilized to calculate the shared meaning of the different VERBs and NOUNs. The results showed that the nouns in [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of], though they might form clusters of meanings, may not behave in the same way with and without the presence of the verbs.

The ontological concepts for 1,256 Mandarin metaphor types (such as cheng2zhang3 ‘grow/growth’ and jian4she4 ‘construct/construction’) were stored in a database in the form of metaphor-concept pairings. In each pair, a Mandarin metaphor type is paired with ontological concepts in English. Based on the relations given in these pairings, a database of relational concept was created. Calculation of co-appearance of concepts can be undertaken using the database. The work will contribute to analysis of conceptual relatedness, semantic networking and relatedness of Mandarin metaphors.