A Diachronic Semantic Analysis of Duó and its Compounds in Mandarin: A Cognitive Linguistic and Corpus-based Study

• Main Authors: Chen, Chu-Wan, 陳筑琬
• Other Authors: Chung, Siaw-Fong
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/vx782z

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 107 === The study investigated the diachronic meanings of the polysemy duó and its internal structures in Mandarin Chinese. The lack of in-depth discussion of duó motivated the study of the diachronic meanings of duó. Data from the Hanchi Database of Academia Sinica, including the Corpus of Old Chinese, the Corpus of Middle Chinese, and the Corpus of Modern Chinese, was extracted as the ancient data of this study and the United Daily News constituted the modern data. Based on the data, the image schemas of duó were presented, utilizing the Force Dynamics theory of Talmy (2000), the Trajector-Landmark Alignment of Langacker (2002), and the Force Schemas of Johnson (1987) as the basic frameworks. A semantic network of polysemous verb duó was also postulated so as to trace its semantic extensions and grammaticalization patterns. It was found that the internal structures of [duó X] were originally verb-resultative complements in the Corpus of Old Chinese, but the frequency gradually decreased with time. The verb-resultative complements of [duó X] were the least frequenct in the Corpus of Modern Chinese. Comparatively, in the Corpus of Early Chinese, the verb-resultative complements of [X duó] were most frequently used. As for [duó X], it was found that [duó X] started to become more common in the Corpus of Early Mandarin Chinese. The directional complements were the most frequently used in the Corpus of Early Mandarin Chinese. From the data, duó appeared most of the time as a single-charactered form in ancient Chinese, but as two-charactered form in modern Chinese. It was also found that there were five image schemas of duó. The two senses ‘to snatch’ and ‘be deprived of’ were distinguished according to the schemas of Johnson (1987). We also discovered that the sense ‘to grip’ was the the core sense based on the interaction between the ‘agonist’ and the ‘antagonist’ discussed in Talmy (2000). In conclusion, this semantic study of polysemy duó will contribute to future diachronic lexical semantic research.