Container metaphor and the cognitive conventionalization of residential naming: a diachronic corpus study of the [X + Li] construction in Chinese.

This study investigates the diachronic metaphorical organization of the Chinese residential naming construction [X + Li] from 1970 to 2019 from a linguistic landscape and cognitive-semantic perspective. Using a corpus of officially registered residential names from Tianjin collected from Anjuke, a major Chinese online real-estate listing platform, the study analyzes 1,672 [X + Li] instances and 228 [X + Yuan] instances. Metaphor types in the modifier X were annotated and inter-annotator reliability was assessed on stratified subsets of both corpora. The annotated data identify eight metaphor types grouped into four cognitive domains. Frequency profiling shows that state metaphors constitute the largest type within [X + Li], while residual analysis shows that the strongest contrast between [X + Li] and [X + Yuan] lies in the marked overrepresentation of category metaphors in [X + Yuan]. To visualize diachronic similarity among metaphor types, multidimensional scaling (MDS) is applied to decade-level proportional profiles. The MDS configuration shows that state metaphors have a distinctive diachronic proportional pattern, remaining highly recurrent across the five decade-based periods rather than reflecting a period-specific fluctuation. Overall, the findings support an interpretation of [X + Li] as a conventionalized spatial-metaphorical naming pattern grounded in a container schema, through which abstract states are regularly associated with bounded residential space.