Semantic Profile as a Source of Polysemy: Insight from the Spatial-Configuration Verb fang in Mandarin

Abstract

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.