| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 86 === The thesis studies phenomena of lexical polysemy found in
someverbs of movement in Taiwanese Southern Min from a
synchronic point of view. Lexical polysemy results from sense
extension, the direction of which is from concrete to abstract.
We start with conceptual structures of verbs and their behavior
in syntactic structures, as well as the mapping correspondence
rules. Then we look into their semantic change in different
realizations. There are many mechanisms responsible for sense
extension, metaphor and metonymy being two of them. Besides,
sentential constructions also give rise to new meanings. A new
meaning can also be inferred from a certain context, which we
call ''pragmatic inference''. The inference meaning is further
promoted to a lexical one. Since the use of language in
different situations is complex and infinite, and yet the
lexicon is finite, there is no way to encode detailed
information into the lexicon. This gap is filled by the
speakers'' world knowledge. The thesis is structured as follows:
Chapter 1 introduces methodology, the verbs to be studied, and
the organization of the thesis; Chapter 2 presents a systematic
review of theoretical framework; Chapter 3 discusses related
issues on verbs of movement; Chapters 4 and 5 present the data
and classify meanings into groups; Chapter 6 gives an account of
sense extension mechanisms; and Chapter 7 concludes our study.
|
|---|
