The polysemy of wine in English and jiu in Chinese

Abstract

Based on two large corpora, BCC and COCA, this study conducts a comparative Behavioural Profile (BP) analysis of the polysemy of the Chinese term jiu and the English term wine . The analysis first employs the Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to visually represent the BP results of the two terms. Subsequently, it integrates the Artificial Intelligence (AI) model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) to triangulate and further enrich the BP findings. The results indicate that, influenced by a combination of cognitive, cultural, and historical factors, both wine and jiu exhibit rich metaphorical meanings. The term jiu demonstrates a higher frequency and greater diversity of metaphorical usage in everyday language, whereas the metaphorical meanings associated with wine tend to be more positive. During the BERT + UMAP validation process, the specific influence of each ID tag (identification tag, which means the various properties of the research object) on semantic expansion is further detailed and visualized. Theoretically, this study integrates artificial intelligence models with cognitive linguistics, advancing our understanding of linguistic phenomena through AI-assisted approaches. Methodologically, the use of AI models to supplement BP analysis helps mitigate the potential subjectivity inherent in BP analysis, thereby enhancing the rigor and scientific validity of the research. This study contributes significantly to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural language understanding and holds practical implications for fields such as translation and cross-linguistic pedagogy.