A structural and semantic analysis of the polysemous verb PAO in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Tsai, Wan-Ling, 蔡宛玲
• Other Authors: Lai, Huei-Ling
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y588rj

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 105 === This study investigates the prevalently used polysemous motion verb PAO “run” in Mandarin Chinese. The data are extracted from Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. Under the framework of Motion Event Frame （Talmy 1975, 1985, 2000）, the study explicates the mechanism of PAO’s syntactic complexities in a more plausible manner. Four different structures of PAO are detected: the most typical intransitive structure [A. NP+PAO], structures with prepostions [B. NP+P+PAO+NP] and [C. NP+PAO+P+NP], and the unconventional transtive structure [D. NP+PAO+NP（oblique case）]. Each structure manifests different conceptual structures. It is claimed that the extention of Path has caused the usage of unconventional transtive structure and the polysemous phenomenon of PAO. In addition, this paper investigates the relationship between the different senses of PAO and elements in its conceptual structure. The relevance and distinction between the different senses of PAO are built as a radial categorization. PAO is suggested to have seven different senses: move quickly with legs, move to specific places, move for specific reasons, escape, two or more participants race, vehicles or objects move and leave the original location. Each sense is related to the overall syntactic structure, the conceptual structure and different contexts. In conclusion, the interaction between the conceputual structure, the syntactic structure and semantic meanings is a major factor that makes a polysemy.