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Semantic Profile as a Source of Polysemy: Insight from the Spatial-Configuration Verb fàng in Mandarin

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9332))

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Abstract

This study provides a linguistic insight to the issue of polysemy. It shows that semantic profile, an important cognitive mechanism, may be the source of verbal polysemy. With a close examination of corpus distribution of the high-frequency verb 放[fàng], we find that the diverse range of semantically and constructionally distinct uses of fàng can be viewed as profiling different stages of a motion-initiated event chain. We therefore propose that a multi-faceted verb such as fàng may involve a cognitively salient sequence of events as its conceptual basis and the various senses of the verb may highlight various portions of the lexical base as a result of semantic profile.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Mei-chun Liu & Jui-ching Chang

Authors
  1. Mei-chun Liu
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  2. Jui-ching Chang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mei-chun Liu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Qin Lu

  2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Helena Hong Gao

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Liu, Mc., Chang, Jc. (2015). Semantic Profile as a Source of Polysemy: Insight from the Spatial-Configuration Verb fàng in Mandarin. In: Lu, Q., Gao, H. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27193-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27194-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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