Lexical Priming of Rhetorical Metaphor—A Case Study of the Chinese Lexicon of feixiang

A widely-accepted view in corpus linguistics is that metaphors are different from their literal use in both meanings and linguistic patterns.However, this conclusion was drawn by analyzing conventional metaphors, with rhetorical metaphors being neglected.This paper presents a case study of the Chinese lexicon of feixiang (fly) in the frameworks of Lexical Priming Theory and Theory of Norms and Exploitations, and explores its primings of rhetorical usage, including the collocation, semantic association, colligation as well as pragmatic association.The results show that there are no fundamental differences between the primings of rhetorical feixiang and literal feixiang.On the contrary, the rhetorical usage of feixiang employs the norms of its literal sense to strike a balance between the semantic deviation and linguistic norms.The difference between the rhetorical and literal usage occurs primarily on the sub-level of meaning.Though the general event structure of feixiang is mapped onto the rhetorical usage, different semantic roles are profiled, which also leads to some subtle changes in colligation.