Verbal Semantics and Eventive Inference: The Case of fàng in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Chang, Jui-Ching, 張睿敬
• Other Authors: Liu, Mei-Chun
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4h53fn

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 === 103 === The present study investigates the polysemous nature of the high-frequency verb fàng放 in Mandarin Chinese, and provides an insight to the issue of polysemy: “Semantic base &; profile” (Langacker 1987, 1990), an important cognitive mechanism, may be one of the sources of polysemy. It argues that the various uses of fàng are actually different profiles of the same semantic base, which is a complete caused-motion event. This thesis adopts a “corpus-based frame-related constructional approach,” which combines the framework of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982) and Lexical-Constructional Grammar (Goldberg 1995, Boas 2003b), to probe into the syntactic and semantic nature of fàng in terms of the semantic roles and the participant constructions of the verb. With a close corpus examination of the syntactic and collocation distribution, the semantic of fàng can be clearly defined: fàng essentially expresses the spatial-motional events of “release (caused to move away from a source),” “put (caused to move to an endpoint),” and “spatial configuration.” In these events, fàng specifies various spatial relations between the roles of Agent, Theme, Source and Endpoint, as well as Path. Moreover, this thesis argues that the events fàng denotes can be considered as profiling various sub-portions of a semantic base. From “release” to “put” to “spatial configuration,” these events may eventively infer one another; they actually form a complete caused-motion event chain: “away from a source” → “move toward a goal” → “end up at an endpoint.”; and with this caused-motion event as a base, the semantically and constructionally diverse uses of fàng can be viewed as various profiles of the base. In this way, the polysemous nature of fàng is principled presented and explained. In short, this thesis proposes that, senses and the polysemous nature of a verb may highly related to the eventive structure the verb predicates; and Semantic base &; profile may be one of the sources of polysemy.