  One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is
to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative
rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language
as complex systems and the dynamic view of metaphor, this paper argues that
metaphorical language change qualifies as a self-organized criticality state
and the linguistic expressions of a metaphor can be profiled as a fractal with
spatio-temporal correlations. Synchronously, these metaphorical expressions
self-organize into a self-similar, scale-invariant fractal that follows a
power-law distribution; temporally, long range inter-dependence constrains the
self-organization process by the way of transformation rules that are intrinsic
of a language system. This argument is verified in the paper with statistical
analyses of twelve randomly selected Chinese verb metaphors in a large-scale
diachronic corpus.
