A Cognitive Approach To Chinese '立'

This thesis is a tentative attempt to provide a synchronic account of semantics of Chinese 'ç«‹' from a cognitive approach, primarily focusing on polysemy evident in it. The analysis is grounded as far as possible in principles which play a fundamental role in cognition rather than principles which are unique to linguistic theory. Psycholinguistic experiments follows to examine the psychological reality of the semantic analysis of 'ç«‹' in this cognitive approach.To start with, the thesis introduces some of the most fundamental facts and views in polysemy to present a general picture of the type of research. A trace back to the origin of polysemy research shows that the 'multiplicity of meaning' was researched well before Breal, who is conventionally considered to have first made the term 'polysemy' popular, in the wide field of rhetoric, in the philosophy of metaphor, in etymology and in lexicography. The development of polysemy research over the years is sketched by identifying three different periods respectively being pre-Brealian, Brealian, and post-Brealian periods. It is observed that post-Breal period bears on two distinct features. One is that the advent of cognitive linguistics brought about a renewed interest into the field, which had experienced a latency especially after the generative views played into blossom. An additional feature is its multi-disciplinary nature in contemporary contexts where polysemy has moved far beyond mere semantics into a variety of fields including computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence. What follows is some short notes on polysemy by different linguistic schools, and debates over three issues are specially introduced to reveal the major concerns and difficulties concerning polysemy research. Compared to nouns and mental-state verbs, posture verbs are characterized as assuming much more flexibility and creativity both in meaning potential and syntactic manifestation.Questions concerning the theoretical background of the present study are primarily addressed in Chapter 2, including what the term 'cognitive' means, the philosophical thoughts in it and cognitive views on meaning. It is clarified that the term 'cognitive' here is fundamentally different from that traditionally used inpsychological or developmental studies. Apart from this, it is acknowledged that the term originated from the early 20th-century philosophical theories of ethics, initially implying truth-evaluable. A distinction between 'first-generation' and 'second-generation' cognitive sciences shows that 'cognitive' in its earlier uses implies a view of mind as the disembodied manipulation of meaningless formal symbols only. It is the embodied cognition that the approach this thesis adopts implies. The crucial roles bodily factors play in our conceptualization and thus in language have found support in various empirical studies from color neurophysiology to neural structures for motor control, whose results all pointed toward a view that what our bodies are like and how they function in the world restrains what we can think to what our embodied brains permit. The cognitive view of meaning, which holds that meaning firstly involves what is meaningful and meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort, is illustrated by summarizing how different kinds of conceptual structures get their meaning as motivated by embodied experiences.After the theoretically way-paving work, the thesis comes to what it is aimed at principally. Before seriously diving into the meanings of 'ç«‹' the thesis reviews Newman's work on 'ç»™' done in a similar approach and points out its inadequacies. Suggestion is made that, despite the general plausibility of the approach, Newman's work suffers from deficiencies mainly in two ways. It is argued that part of his analysis is based on false presupposition, specifically concerning what is called by him the double gei construction in which case Newman treats both 'ç»™' as reflecting the same part of speech, and besides, the multi-part-of-speech problem is not explicated within the base he offers. The thesis believes that if the cognitive approach to polysemy in Chinese posture verbs should ever be acknowledged as justified and effective, it cannot afford to leave the multi-part-of-speech phenomenon un-addressed. After a comparison between 'ç»™' and 'ç«‹', 'ç«‹' is examined as a structure at two different levels. It indicates that 'ç«‹', when used as a bound morpheme to combine with other morphemes to form an independent Chinese character, relates itself with the fundamental embodied, physical experience in the spatio-temporal domain and rarely displays polysemy. Investigation into 'ç«‹'as a free standing morpheme suggested that its polysemy can...