| Sumario: | How is loudness expressed metaphorically in Chinese? In this study, using the lexical and corpus-based approaches to metaphor studies, I examine linguistic manifestations of five loudness metaphors with the following source concepts: HEIGHT, BRIGHTNESS, SIZE, THICKNESS, and WEIGHT. On the one hand, the lexical approach shows words with lexicalized loudness senses and their compounding patterns in the dictionaries, which suggest different levels of conventionality, semantic differentiation and conflation, and implicit similarities between Chinese and English. On the other hand, the corpus-based approach reveals frequent, novel, and reduplicative uses of words, implicit instantiations of loudness metaphors, antonymic asymmetries, and interactions between loudness metaphors and other sound metaphors. It is further shown that, with evidence from lexicalized senses of words in the dictionaries and metaphorical uses of words in the corpora, there exist both explicit and implicit similarities between Chinese and English loudness metaphors, which are motivated by the conceptual associations between the target concept LOUDNESS and its source concepts. Furthermore, the figurative uses of 嗓 săng "larynx" and 气 qì "vital energy" for loudness in Chinese indicate that metaphorical and metonymic expressions are a window into exploring how we think and speak in a cultural context.
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