Metaphorical Instances of LÊN and XUỐNG in Vietnamese: Corpus-based Dataset Supporting Cultural Valence Inversions

This dataset contains 506 metaphorical instances of the Vietnamese spatial terms <i>lên</i> ("up") and <i>xuống</i> ("down"), extracted from a private corpus hosted on VietCorpus. The dataset comprises two Excel files: one for <i>lên</i> (304 instances) and one for <i>xuống</i> (202 instances). Each entry includes the metaphorical expression, contextual sentence, connotative meaning (positive, negative, neutral), target domain, and conceptual category. This dataset supports the findings presented in the manuscript <i>Beyond GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN: Cultural Valence Inversions in Vietnamese Orientational Metaphors</i>, submitted to <i>Metaphor and Symbol</i>.The data illustrates how Vietnamese orientational metaphors systematically invert universal valence patterns proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory, highlighting the role of cultural elaboration in shaping embodied metaphorical extensions.