Browsing by Author "Chang, Jui-ching"

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Semantic Profile as a Source of Polysemy: Insight from the Spatial-Configuration Verb fang in Mandarin
(2015)
Liu, Mei-chun
;
Chang, Jui-ching
;
外國文學與語言學碩士班
;
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
This study provides a linguistic insight to the issue of polysemy. It shows that semantic profile, an important cognitive mechanism, may be the source of verbal polysemy. With a close examination of corpus distribution of the high-frequency verb [fang], we find that the diverse range of semantically and constructionally distinct uses of fang can be viewed as profiling different stages of a motion-initiated event chain. We therefore propose that a multifaceted verb such as fang may involve a cognitively salient sequence of events as its conceptual basis and the various senses of the verb may highlight various portions of the lexical base as a result of semantic profile.