| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 100 === Polysemy refers to a grouping of related but distinct senses of a single lexical item. Cognitive semantics applies metonymic and metaphorical mappings within the conceptual system to explain the relatedness among senses. However, the synchronic distinction of senses lacks a coherent theoretical framework; consequently, semanticists could only make their own analyses, including speakers’ intuition. This explains the existence of seven, nine or even up to seventeen different senses of the same Chinese perception verb ‘kan’ in previous studies.
The main goal of this dissertation is to explore the various directions in the linguistic categorizations of polysemy via the analysis of the Chinese perception verb ‘kan’, examples of which are drawn from the Academic Sinica Corpus and the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Chinese. Utilizing Principled Polysemy (Evans, 2005) as the proposed framework, seven distinct senses of ‘kan’ have been identified, including one sanctioning sense. In addition, the metonymic and metaphorical mappings within the conceptual system explain the relatedness among the seven senses of ‘kan’. The seven senses have their own unique images as well, and some senses even exhibit subjectivity. This research employs the behavioral profiles of seven senses of ‘kan’ to suggest that its semantic network differs from the radial structure of general polysemy. By analyzing the similarities and relationships among these seven senses, a clear semantic network of ‘kan’ is constructed accordingly. Finally, possible paths of extensions of the senses of ‘kan’ are proposed via the analysis of ‘kan’ from diachronic perspectives.
The results of this study show that continuum does not merely exist in the processes among the seven senses of ‘kan’, but also exist in metonymic and metaphorical mappings among them. Both continuum and family resemblance exist in the behavioral profiles of these seven senses as well. This reveals that human conceptual system can be embodied in semantic structure, and semantic structure can also actuate computational system. Language universal does exist in human cognition hence.
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