The Study on the Polysemy of V-Xialai:A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis

• Main Authors: Meu-chun Liu, 劉美君
• Other Authors: Huang, Li-jung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/73789354821285961006

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系研究所 === 98 === Directions have been the central issue in the study of Polysemy in Chinese. For it is universal that time is denoted by the spatial word; therefore, Direction words often involve the issue of tense and aspect。Most of studies focus on the changing path of grammaticalization but no generative principal is given to account for the polysemy and the Verb Selection; and it has confusing the Chinese Language learners. Many studies pointed out that Xialai can serve as Aspect Marker which can denote the completive of action and also the inchoative, durative, end of the state, etc. However, such function is limited to Verb Selection; and little studies paid attention to this. Constructional Grammar which focuses on the match of Form and Meaning is developed based on Frame Semantic which focuses on the participants of an event. And Construction Grammar can tell us verb selection is based on what kind of semantics. Thus it resolves the problem discussed above, so this study adopts Frame Semantic and Constructional Grammar to account for the polysemy of V-Xialai, and tries to propose a generative principle to account for the Verb Selection. In addition, Image Schema is used to illustrate the variant semantic representation of Xialai is resulted from the different focus.