從語言使用到構式固化：漢語多義結果動詞「V-開」的認知語言學研究

The present study examines the semantic structure of a specific class of Japanese verbs within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The verbs in question are highly polysemous and assumed to be centered around a particular spatial or force-dynamic schema – hence the name image schema verbs. Further, they partake in verb-verb compounding as grammatical “auxiliaries” (V2s) which functionally resemble the particles of English and German verb particle constructions (VPCs). Over the course of five case studies it is shown that the respective V2s are inherently meaningful and that their senses are motivated by the same image schematic structures that motivate the senses of the simplex. Thus, simplex and V2 are entangled in a complex network of family resemblences. Mechanisms of meaning extension such as metaphor, metonymy, and image schema transformation are examined in some detail and often from a cross-linguistic point of view. Rejecting a principled division between lexicon and grammar in favor of the symbolic continuum hypothesis, argument structure phenomena are then reexamined and reframed as issues of cognitive prominence. In the same spirit, the traditional dichotomy of “lexical” vs “grammatical” V-V compounds, a staple of Japanese linguistics, is challenged from a usage-based perspective. Based on the results of the case studies, the thesis closes with a brief cross-cultural inquiry into embodied cognition, showing that directly embodied source domains tend to have similar metaphorical scope in Japanese and German.

This paper reports the findings from a semantic judgment priming task aimed at examining how senses of three semantically complex Mandarin verbs chī ‘eat’, dǎ ‘hit’, and xǐ ‘wash’ are stored in the mental lexicon. In the experiment, the prime stimuli belonged to the basic senses of the three critical polysemous verbs. Three target conditions, that is, verb phrases with the same basic senses (e.g. chī niupai ‘to eat steak’), closely related senses (e.g. chī wěiya ‘to attend a year-end party’), and distantly related senses (e.g. chī lǎoběn ‘to live on one’s own fat’), were prepared to test whether processing patterns varied for different types of extended senses within a polysemous verb. The results indicate linearly decreasing priming effects for senses moving from the core senses, through closely related senses, to distantly related senses. These effects conflict with the separate-entry view and provide evidence for a shared core representation among polysemous senses.

Processing of metaphor has long been studied due to implications on human cognition. But less has been explored as to its relationship with lexical access. This is important, because comprehension of conventional metaphors fundamentally hinges on activation of lexicalized metaphorical meanings, but early lexical access models rarely consider a distinction between literal and metaphorical meanings. This study attempts to bring these two lines of research together by investigating processing of lexical metaphors, i.e., metaphorical polysemy (e.g., “pressure”) based on Giora’s (2003) graded salience hypothesis. The graded salience hypothesis states that salient meanings, i.e., “more frequent, more familiar, or more conventional” meanings, are always initially accessed in context. Giora’s model differs from previous models because it comprehensively interprets lexical access as well as figurative language processing, thus receiving much attention in literature (Gibbs, 2001). But it has two major problems: (1) Vague definition of salience, particularly its relationship with frequency, and (2) Unclear criteria for semantic analysis and meaning distinction. To address these issues, this thesis combined a corpus linguistic approach and recent cognitive semantic theories with psycholinguistic experiments. I distinguished sense-level meanings from facet-level meanings based on Chinese Wordnet and calculate their sense frequencies in corpus. In one offline word association task and two online cross-modal lexical priming tasks, I found: Salient, sense-level literal meanings cannot be sufficiently activated in metaphorically-biased contexts. This contradicted the graded salience hypothesis’s prediction but corresponded to Ahrens et al.’s (1998) and Croft and Cruse’s (2004) lexical semantic theories that sense-level meanings cannot coexist in the same context. The study thus has significant implications on the graded salience hypothesis and for metaphor and lexical access research in general; particularly, a refined lexical semantic analysis based on cognitive linguistic theories is necessary. Besides, the results shed light on the relationship between frequency and salience, i.e., how corpus reflects human cognition, as well as how cognitive semantic theories can refine interpretations in psycholinguistic studies. Therefore, the study is expected to have a cross-domain contribution to the general field of cognitive science.

This paper investigates the semantic features and the conceptual foundation of the degree adverb tai 'too' in Mandarin Chinese from a cognitive-psychological perspective. The adverb tai often modifies qualitative adjectives, psychological verbs or verb phrases, forming a ”tai A/V” construction. This construction is used to express two meanings: a high degree or an excess degree. Meanwhile, the speaker's intense emotion is released by the use of tai. The common conceptual foundation of the two meanings is that the actual quantification of the object greatly deviates one of the subjective quantities (SQ) in the speaker's cognition: the stereotypical value or the expectation value. The deviation from the SQ may be positive or negative. When the ”tai A/V” construction designates a negative deviation, it implies that the degree of the deviation exceeds the limit of the speaker's tolerance, resulting in the speaker's discontent. When the construction designates a positive deviation, it implies that the deviation is desirable for the speaker, thus evoking the speaker's praise, admiration, fondness, satisfaction or pride. Sometimes when the positive deviation exceeds a limit, the positive property turns to negative. The consequence of the deviation is often presented in the subsequent clause. Compared to other high-degree adverbs like hen 'very', the adverb tai not only marks off a high degree, but also conveys the speaker's subjective viewpoint and intense emotion. Moreover, the ”tai A/V” construction may combine with negative marker bu 'not' to indicate an excess degree or perform a euphemistic function.

One of the fundamental issues of semantics is polysemy, a topic that has been approached from different positions over the years (Bolinger 1965, Kempson 1977, Pottier 1977). However, one of the most interesting positions that addresses this issue is that of cognitive semantics (Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1991), since it proposes that the different meanings of a word are not given in a random way, but that there is a conceptual basis from which they start by losing and gaining semantic traits through the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy. This work presents an analysis of the verb PASAR, one of the movement verbs in Spanish with the greatest number of meanings (Morero 2007). Based on the principles of cognitive semantics, the analysis shows that the broad polysemy of the verb PASAR does not occur in a random way, but rather responds to a categorial systematicity.

The reading of action verbs has been shown to activate motor areas, whereby sentence context may serve to either globally strengthen this activation or to selectively sharpen it. To investigate this issue, we manipulated the presence of manual actions and sentence context, assessing the level of corticospinal excitability by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation. We hypothesized that context would serve to sharpen the neural representation of the described actions in the motor cortex, reflected in context-specific modulation of corticospinal excitability.Participants silently read manual action verbs and non-manual verbs, preceded by a full sentence (rich context) or not (minimal context). Transcranial magnetic stimulation pulses were delivered at rest or shortly after verb presentation. The coil was positioned over the cortical representation of the right first dorsal interosseous (pointer finger).We observed a general increase of corticospinal excitability while reading both manual action and non-manual verbs in minimal context, whereas the modulation was action-specific in rich context: corticospinal excitability increased while reading manual verbs, but did not differ from baseline for non-manual verbs. These findings suggest that sentence context sharpens motor representations, activating the motor cortex when relevant and eliminating any residual motor activation when no action is present.

A verb phrase is a kind of conformation expression, which is composed of verbs and sketch words (including prepositions and adverbs). They appear in large numbers in modern English, serving as an essential part which college students are expected to master. At the same time, the grammatical structure of verb phrases is complex and has become intricate for college students to grasp. Therefore, how to help college students effectively master verb phrases has become the focus of this study. With the development of the ecological perspective of cognitive linguistics, the phenomenon of verbs phrase has gradually received the attention of cognitive linguists. From the perspective of cognitive Linguistics ecology, this paper draws the following conclusions by comparing the teaching methods based on the ecological perspective of cognitive linguistics and the influence of traditional pedagogy on the learning of verb phrase . First, compared with the traditional pedagogy, the teaching method based on the ecological perspective of cognitive linguistics can promote the learning of the verb phrase. Second, based on the ecological perspective of cognitive linguistics, college students have better long-term memory effects on verb phrase that have been studied than short-term memory; third, based on the ecological perspective of cognitive linguistics, college students are able to apply the cognitive rationale behind phrase verbs that have been studied to new metaphorical verbs.

After acknowledgments and a general index, the thesis opens with an introductory chapter which gives a brief outline of the theory and model of grammatical description upon which this study is based, and reviews the previous work on Hindi verbal syntax. This is followed by the two main chapters of the work. In chapter 2 Hindi sentence structure and the sub-classes of verb which are relevant for the for the fornulatioa of the Constituent Structure rules are discussed, before the rules thenselves are set out. Chapter 5 first gives some of the singuiary transformations, the nominalization, adjectivalization and adverbialization rules follow, and the chapter ends with the singulary transformational rules. The Appendix following these three chapters comprises a lexicon which lives a list of Hindi verbs with their appropriate syntactic, selectional and semantic features, and lists of the other lexical categories with only their selectional features. The thesis ends with a bibliography of works on general linguistic theory and the model of Transformational - Generative Crammar on the one hand, and on Hindi language on the other.

Although Chinese speakers use the Chinese bei-construction to express a neutral or positive meaning more often that before, it seems that the main use of the bei-construction is still for expressing a negative meaning. However, it remains unclear whether the negative meaning affecting the use of bei is derived from sentence-level semantics or merely the verb’s internal connotation. In this study, we selected the 10 most positive verbs, 10 most neutral verbs and 10 most negative verbs among 140 verbs in a pretest. These three types of verbs were then put into three kinds of sentences (positive, neutral, and negative), with the sentences of each type of verb/sentence combination. These 90 sentences were presented to Chinese native speakers, who were asked to score their acceptability. A two-way ANOVA found a highly significant main effect of sentence type on acceptability, but no effect of verb type, and no sentence x verb interaction. Post hoc tests showed that the results were due to high acceptability scores fro sentences with negative connotations. Consistent with an interactive approach, the Chinese bei-construction is affected more by a higher level of semantic context than by local structural or lexical factor.

Coreference resolution is the problem of determining which mention in a text refer to the same entities, and is a crucial and difficult step in every natural language processing task. Despite the efforts that have been made in the past to solve this problem, its performance still does not meet today’s applications requirements. Given the importance of the verbs in sentences, in this work we tried to incorporate three types of their information on coreference resolution problem, namely, selectional restriction of verbs on their arguments, semantic relation between verb pairs, and the truth that arguments of a verb cannot be coreferent of each other. As a needed resource for supporting our model, we generate a repository of semantic relations between verb pairs automatically using Distributional Memory (DM), a state-of-the-art framework for distributional semantics. This resource consists of pairs of verbs associated with their probable arguments, their role mapping, and significance scores based on our measures. Our proposed model for coreference resolution encodes verbs’ knowledge with Markov logic network rules on top of deterministic Stanford coreference resolution system. Experiment results show that this semantic layer can improve the recall of the Stanford system while preserves its precision and improves it slightly.

This paper focuses on a problem which has been the object of numerous studies centered mainly on Germanic languages, and which concerns general linguistics : determining to what extent the meaning of a derivative can be predicted from the meaning of the base. The author attempts to answer this question by taking the Romagnese dialect as an example. By observing 232 Romagnol deverbatives (corresponding to pairs of verbs derived from a single noun with variations in the prefix), it was possible to establish that the meaning of 76% of them can be predicted from the base noun. The main causes of idiosyncrasy are : flaws in the lexical system (homonymy, polysemy), the phenomenon of transference of denomination (metaphor, metonymy), chance events linked to the history of lexicon (modification of originally regular meaning, introduction of units from other systems, etc.). This relatively high rate of readability seems to correct the somewhat chaotic view on derivation proposed by English and American linguists and to accord with the conclusions of scholars (Rainer, Corbin) who have measured the semantic predictability of derivatives in Romance languages

This study investigates the reclassification of English locative verbs with the following question: What factors caused the change? Firstly, the patten of the class change is observed in terms of both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and then possible factors that cause the change are investigated sequentially by examining whether the factors may be operable. In addition, this study observed what factor can work at the base and what factor can be applied extensively. Reclassified verbs have changed their class from Ground-only to alternating verb class, and there is a preference to use most alternating locative verbs in Figure precedent constructions. This study reveals that there are two processes or two levels of processing that affect the syntactic change involved in the use of locative verbs, but they are independent. In one case, semantic change directly affects the structure of locative verbs. In the second case, the cognitive process directly causes the class change. However, this change is not affected by semantic change. Figure Precedence Principle can be an important factor in explaining the change in the use of locative verbs by reflecting on the cognitive process of human brain.

This article concerns the properties of the reflexive Russian, Polish and Czech constructions, which comprehend an Experiencer in the Dative case and a evalutative Adverb. The aim of the analysis is to demonstrate that these components, together with the activity verb and the reflexive particle, form a whole, determining the grammatical and semantic properties of these specific sentences.

This article presents the result of an investigation on the development of more abstracted microconstructions based on predicative lexical evidential structured with the prototypical dicendi verb. Three Romance languages ​​were contrasted: Brazilian Portuguese (BP) ( dizer ), Spanish (ESP) ( decir ) and Italian (IT) ( dire ). The evidential semantic domain concerns the source of the enunciated knowledge (Aikhenvald 2004; Casseb-Galvao 2001) and its coding can occur by lexical and/or procedural elements. The main hypothesis involves the recognition that across languages more prototypical lexical uses originate processes of constructional changes of abstract evidentials, with grammatical or discursive meanings, as [ diski ], in PB, ( decir ), in ESP and si dice che , in IT.

Zusammenfassung: Für die Rezeption von Handlungsanweisungen sind Verben von besonderer Bedeutung. Im Sonderforschungsbereich 360 (SFB 360) spielen vor allem Handlungsverben für Konstruktionsaufgaben eine Rolle. Um eine Instruktion angemessen zu verstehen, muß neben der Verbsemantik auch der situative Objektkontext beachtet werden. Es werden drei Experimente vorgestellt: In einem Vorexperiment (N = 23) wurden anhand dreier Verben der Ablauf und das Grund-Design der Experimente erprobt. In Experiment 1 (N = 50) wurde dann der Beitrag der sprachlich-semantischen Faktoren Verbspezifität und Spezifität der Benennung eines Zielobjektes in Interaktion mit den visuellen Kontextfaktoren referentielle Eindeutigkeit bzw. Ambiguität der Farbe und Funktion des Zielobjektes untersucht. Dabei wurden acht Verbpaare verwendet, die mit Hilfe eines Fragebogens ermittelt wurden. In Experiment 2 (N = 22) wurde weiterhin die Position der Verben (mit sechs der ursprünglichen acht Verbpaare) in den Anweisungen in Interaktion mit diesen Kontextfaktoren betrachtet. Es zeigt sich, daß die Rezeption von Anweisungen zur Manipulation von Objekten sowohl durch die sprachlich gegebene als auch durch die visuell verfügbare Information determiniert wird.