A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the Polysemous Dimension Adjectives USUI and ASAI in Japanese

• Main Authors: Mei-Ting Chiu, 邱媺婷
• Other Authors: 趙順文
• Format: Others
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/68532398433309733950

碩士 === 臺灣大學 === 日本語文學研究所 === 98 === Previous studies on Japanese dimension adjectives are focused on the semantic system and the explanation of polysemy. Those studies have failed to provide careful accounts to illustrate the semantic relationships between the basic meanings and the expanding meanings of dimension adjectives. Therefore, this thesis discuss the semantic extension and the polysemic structure of words USUI “薄い” and ASAI “浅い” in Japanese, which is based on the approach of cognitive linguistics. And then analyze the result of semantic analysis to investigate the different characteristics of the cognition of both adjectives. This thesis consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the Introduction of this thesis. In Chapter 2, I review the previous researches on the basic meaning of USUI “薄い” and ASAI “浅い”, and introduce the approach of cognitive linguistics. In Chapter 3, I focus on the polysemic structure of words USUI “薄い” and ASAI “浅い”, and analyze how the meaning is extended from the basic meaning to the expanding meaning from the perspective of metaphor and metonymy. In Chapter 4, I present the result of the contrastive analysis. And the fifth chapter is Conclusion.