A Frame-based Lexical Constructional Study of the Polysemic Verb Dài in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Hu, Yun-Ting, 胡韵庭
• Other Authors: Liu, Mei-Chun
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/sew799

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 102 === The present study probes into the polysemic nature of the verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ in Mandarin, in which dài 帶 ‘bring’ is found to bear at least nine meaning imports. Integrating Frame Semantic (Fillmore and Atkins 1992) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2010), this study aims to explore the semantic-to-syntactic correlations between the different senses underlining the syntactic realizations of dài 帶 ‘bring’. It is argued that dài 帶 ‘bring’ may profile different semantic scopes from the semantic base: dài 帶 ‘bring’ as a caused-motion verb, with distinct frame-specific roles and morphosyntactic realizations. The basic sense of the caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’ depicts a co-motion event in which an agent Mover takes a Co-Movee to undergo a locational change (e.g., xuésheng dài qián dào xuéxiào jiǎo zhùcèfèi 學生帶錢到學校繳註冊費 ‘Students bring the money to the school to pay for the registration fee.’). Nevertheless, due to conceptual transfers, dài 帶 ‘bring’ may be used to profile a dynamic co-action event in leading and initiating an activity (e.g., wǒ dài tā huán yóu shìjiè 我帶他環遊世界 ‘I took him to travel around the world.’) and further extended to profile the stative co-existence relation without movement (e.g., tā shēnshàng dài zhe hùzhào 她身上帶著護照 ‘He brought the passport with him.’). Based on these three semantic domains, it is postulated that other non-central senses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ are derived either when the prototypical cases of semantic roles are mapped unto different semantic relations or when the event highlights a specific semantic attribute. The analysis proposed in this study is substantiated with a detailed corpus analysis of colloconstructional variations. It follows the frame-based lexical constructional approach in delimiting semantically salient features pertaining to lexical frames with a constructional account that captures the form-meaning mapping correlations. The study provides a clear case study that demonstrates the close interaction between semantics and syntax, lexicon and construction and ultimately, cognition and language.