Semantic profile as a source of polysemy: Insight from the spatial-configuration verb fàng in mandarin

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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 [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 multifaceted 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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Liu, M. C., & Chang, J. C. (2015). Semantic profile as a source of polysemy: Insight from the spatial-configuration verb fàng in mandarin. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 9332, pp. 24–32). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_3

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