Creation and Change in Internet Women-Referring Metaphors: Profiling and Reprofiling

According to conceptual metaphor theory, a metaphor results from the mapping of a source domain to a target domain. This mapping is partial: it maps only a feature or a set of small number of features of the source domain to the target domain. In this paper, we first propose that the selection of source domain feature(s) to be mapped is a process of profiling, per Langacker (1987). Second, we document the change of semantic degradation of women-referring expressions and argue that this change can also be captured via profiling, which we call re-profiling. Our paper thus contributes to both cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics.