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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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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