A Referendum Is a Forward-Moving Object or a Bundled Object?

This article analyzes how a referendum is represented through the use of conceptual metaphors in two major newspapers in Taiwan, the Liberty Times and the United Daily News. The analysis indicates that a general schema for the referendum a causer causes an object to move or stop, which is further divided to the forward-moving and stopping sub-schemas, can be retrieved from the metaphors used. Moreover, it shows that three expressions for the forward-moving sub-schema, as lexicalized in the legislation domain, are predominant in the representation of the referendum. With the inevitability to use the general schema, the two newspapers take strategies to elaborate or neutralize the effects embedded in the schema, so as to transmit their respective political stances.

1. 1.

   The wording of the referendum question, National Referendum Proposal No. 5, is translated by Lu [9] as follows: In 1971, the People’s Republic of China joined the United Nations, replacing the Republic of China and making Taiwan an international orphan. Do you agree that the government, in a strong expression of the will of the Taiwanese people and in order to elevate Taiwan’s international status and promote its international participation, should join the United Nations under the name ‘Taiwan’?

2. 2.

   The Word Sketch of the Sketch Engine (https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/ipauth/) presents how a word behave, e.g. as a subject or an object, in a sentence. According to the Word Sketch of the Chinese Gigaword, the grammatical objects of include ‘democratic reforms’, ‘constitutional reform’, ‘policy’, ‘scheme’, ‘plan’, ‘bill’, etc., and the grammatical subject of this process includes the unit of legislation or implementation: e.g. ‘government’, ‘ministries and councils’, etc. The grammatical subjects of ‘to pass (through)’ contain ‘bill’, ‘statute’, ‘amendment’, ‘resolution’, ‘draft’, etc. Regarding ‘to pass the pass’, expressions in the lawmaking field such as ‘extension case’, ‘reconsideration case’, etc., are dominant. It is obvious that these three lexemes are widely used and lexicalized in the legislation domain.

The authors would like to thank Prof. Meichun Liu and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The second author would like to acknowledge partial funding support from Hong Kong University Grant Council General Research Fund Grant #1240014. All remaining errors are our own.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Center for General Education, National Taitung University, Taitung City, Taiwan

   Ren-feng Duann

2. Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

   Kathleen Ahrens

3. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

   Chu-Ren Huang

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ren-feng Duann .

Editors and Affiliations

1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

   Jia-Fei Hong

2. Peking University, Beijing, China

   Qi Su

3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

   Jiun-Shiung Wu

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