Conceptual Metaphors in the Construal of Architecture–Nature Relationships in English and Vietnamese Architectural Project Descriptions: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

This study investigates how conceptual metaphor contributes to the construal of architecture–nature relationships in English and Vietnamese architectural project descriptions. The corpus comprises 20 residential project descriptions: ten English texts (4,397 tokens) and ten Vietnamese texts (6,215 tokens). Rather than preselecting a source domain, the study delimits ARCHITECTURE–NATURE RELATIONSHIP as the target-domain scope, identifies metaphor-related language following the principles of MIPVU, and only subsequently assigns source domains and mapping structures. Following two full-corpus audit passes and the conservative exclusion of boundary cases with competing literal or spatial readings, 39 metaphorical relation expressions were retained: 19 in the English subcorpus and 20 in the Vietnamese subcorpus, corresponding to 4.32 and 3.22 expressions per 1,000 tokens, respectively. Four observed source-family patterns emerged: PHYSICAL INTEGRATION/CONNECTION/TRANSFER, PERSON/SOCIAL RELATION, BODY/LIVING ENTITY, and PHYSICAL FORMATION/SHAPING. In the sampled data, English is relatively balanced between social-relational and physical-integration construals, whereas Vietnamese relies more heavily on boundary removal, weaving, mixing, contact, and transfer. The findings suggest a shared broad orientation in which architecture and nature are construed as entities capable of interaction and integration, alongside differences in how this relationship is linguistically profiled. Because the corpus is small and non-parallel and coding was conducted by a single researcher, numerical differences are interpreted descriptively only.