Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Summary
In this chapter, different approaches to the studies of motion events and bringing verbs in English have been reviewed. On the conceptual basis, Talmy (2000) explored the lexicalization patterns of the motion event, while Li (2007) identified the prototypical notion of caused motion with the Prototype Theory. Within a constructional framework, Goldberg (1995) proposed English caused-motion construction considering the form-meaning correspondence, while Pan and Chang (2005) claimed the various patterns for Chinese caused-motion constructions. Liu et al (2003) looked into the unique sequential order of motion verbs and postulated the prototypical linear sequence in Mandarin motion event. On the other hand, Levin (1993) and Fillmore and Atkins (1992) viewed and classified English bring and carry respectively from the alternation-based and frame-based approach.
Though numerous studies have focused on motion events, few studies have paid attention to the unique behaviors of Mandarin dài 帶 ‘bring’ as a frequently occurring verb in the motion domain. With a corpus-based investigation, this study aims to go beyond the above studies by looking into the collocational patterns, and the semantic-to-syntactic attributes to account for the polysemic dài 帶 ‘bring’ in Mandarin in light of the conceptual and grammatical structures of caused motion.
Chapter 3
Database, Theoretical Frameworks, and Methodology
3.1 Database
The corpus data used in this study are selected from two sources: 1) Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (http://db1x.sinica.edu.tw/kiwi/mkiwi/), which collects literary works on different topics and registers, and is now currently contains ten millions words; 2) the Chinese Word Sketch Engine (CWS) (http://wordsketch.ling.sinica.edu.tw/), which provides the functions of the query of keywords and collocation associations. Other sources used in this study also include: 1) the on-line resource Google search engines (http://www.google.com/) and FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/).
Among all the databases, Sinica Corpus contains 3050 lexical entries of dài 帶
‘bring’ in total, while Gigawords in Chinese Word Sketch Engine contains 79064 entries of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in total. Some of the data are selected and analyzed as the key data in the present study.
3.2 Theoretical Frameworks
The present study aims to explore the polysemy of dài 帶 ‘bring’ by adopting the frame-based lexical constructional approach, which integrates the framework of Frame Semantics (Fillmore and Atkins 1992) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2010). In addition, the theoretical foundations laid on the studies of polysemy, including Langacker’s semantic profile and the prototypical theory, are also adopted to account for the manifold meaning relatedness of dài 帶 ‘bring’. The above mentioned theoretical frameworks will be briefly reviewed in this section.
3.2.1 Frame-based Lexical Constructional Approach
The frame-based lexical constructional approach is a new framework proposed and adopted by this study which combines Frame Semantics and the constructional approach given by Fillmore and Atkins (1992) and Goldberg (1995). The core conception of the two approaches will be given in this section and followed by an overview of these two approaches.
Frame Semantics is the theory of linguistics proposed by Fillmore and Atkins (1992) that defines the meanings of a lexicon based on the conceptual background knowledge. That is, one cannot understand a word without accessing to the essential knowledge related to the word. Under this assumption, every lexicon is proposed to evoke one or more semantic frames which own a set of core frame elements that are defined by the participant roles involved in the event. Also, it is noted that the profile of different frame elements will lead to different syntactic realizations. Hence, verb meanings can be distinguished and identified through different frame elements and relevant syntactic behaviors that verbs are involved with.
As for the constructional approach proposed by Goldberg (1995), the theory of Construction Grammar takes constructions as basic units of language. The construction itself represents “form-meaning correspondences that exist independently of a particular verb.” (Goldberg 1995:1) That is, the semantics of the construction is not compositionally derived from other constructions existing in the grammar. Moreover, CG recognizes the fact that the relations of verb and construction are interrelated but independent. The basic meaning of a construction relies on both verbs’ profiled participant roles and the argument roles associated with the construction, as demonstrated by the difference between rob and steal:
(15) rob <thief target goods>
steal <thief target goods> (Goldberg 1995:45)
As an overview of the above two approaches, Frame Semantics indeed provides overall frame-relevant semantic information of the participant roles that a verb may involve with and offers a way to categorize different semantic frames for a wide range of lexical items. Nevertheless, it ignores a crucial fact about the construction that a verb may participate in and hence may sometimes fail to capture the constructional meaning that interacts with the lexical meaning of verbs. On the other hand, construction grammar provides a new way to analyze the composition of the arguments on the basis of form-meaning correspondences. However, this theory is somehow too powerful and overgeneralized, so that it may ignore the semantic-to-syntactic restrictions and variations manifested by lexical verbs that fall into the same semantic class.
In view of the above, this study incorporates the above two approaches to explore the interactions of lexical semantics and construction that underlie the syntactic realizations of the polysemic verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ in Mandarin Chinese. Together with a detailed bottom-up analysis of the corpus data, this study aims to ultimately offer a more fine-grained categorization and semantic anlaysis on the multi-faceted meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’.
3.2.3 The Prototypical Category Theory and Semantic Profile
In addition to frame-based and constructional-based frameworks, the present study also adopts the frameworks of the Prototypical Category Theory and Semantic Profile to account for the semantic relation of the multiple meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’.
According to Rosch (1978:36), prototypes can be defined as the ‘clearest cases of category membership defined operationally by people’s judgments of goodness of
membership in the category’. A prototype of a category is thus viewed as a salient exemplar of the category. In other words, people categorize objects on the basis of the resemblance of the shared attributes between the prototypical members of the category and the objects. For examples, sparrows, robins, and etc are the prototypical instances of the category birds, but chickens, ostriches, and penguins are not the central members and thus are non-prototypical cases. Taylor (1995) further explicates two interpretations of prototype. One is that we can apply prototype to the central member or the cluster of central members of a category, but we can also understand prototype as a schematic representation of the conceptual core of a category (Taylor 1995:59).
As for the concept of semantic profile proposed by Langacker (1987), it concerns the conception of the distinction between the scope of a predication and the entity designated by it, which is called as base and profile. The profile is defined as a kind of focal point, suggesting the special prominence of the designated element, while the base is the encyclopedic knowledge that the concept presupposes. As noted by him,
‘the semantic value of an expression derives from the designation of a specific entity identified by its position within a larger configuration.’ (Langacker 1987:183) Moreover, a single base forms a domain when it supports a number of different profiles.
For instance, Circle is the base domain for the concept of arc, center, and circumstance since they are the concepts profiled by the configuration of Circle.
With the above theoretical concepts, this study aims to deal with the semantic relatedness of the polysemous dài 帶 ‘bring’ by applying the concept of prototypicality and the semantic base and profile in an aim to clarify the interrelationships among them.
3.3 Methodology
In order to capture and futher analyze the semantics-to-syntactic interactions of
dài 帶 ‘bring’, this study adopts a corpus-based method to substantiate the findings and analysis for this research. The procedure for the present research includes the following five steps:
Step 1: Collecting the corpus data
As a corpus-based study, the beginning step for this study is to collect as much as data of dài 帶 ‘bring’ from the selected databases. In this study, the main data come from the Sinica Corpus and Word Sketch Engine. Parts of the data are extracted from Google Search Engine.
Step 2: Observing and examining the data
With the collected data, the second step begins to observe any possible linguistic phenomenon revealed in the data, including both semantic and syntactic information such as argument structures, participant roles, collocations or lexicalization patterns of the verb.
Step 3: Sorting out the semantic meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’
In order to account for the multi-faceted meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’, with the preliminary observation of the data, the third step comes to sorting out the possible meanings manifested in dài 帶 ‘bring’.
Step 4: Categorizing the syntactic realizations of different meanings
The fourth step is to classify and categorize all the syntactic patterns of the data with regards to their associations with the meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’.
Step 5: Analyzing the semantic and syntactic correlations of the data
Finally, the above classifications of the semantic-to-syntactic relationships of dài 帶 ‘bring’ will be analyzed on the basis of the theoretical frameworks introduced in Section 3.2.
Following these steps, interesting findings of the corpus data will be first presented in the next chapter, and a detailed semantic analysis of the data will be provided in Chapter 5.
Chapter 4 Findings
This chapter aims to show some important findings obtained from corpus observations. These findings illustrate the basic semantic and syntactic phenomena manifested in Mandarin dài 帶 ‘bring’, which serve as crucial clues for the identification of different uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’. Section 4.1 presents the distributional frequency of dài 帶 ‘bring’ regarding the syntactic patterns and the semantic meanings, Section 4.2 shows the findings of the semantic distinction of the predominant motional and non-motional uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in terms of their defining patterns, participant roles and semantic attributes, Section 4.3 gives the collocation patterns of both motional and non-motional use with respect to their collocated morphemes and collocational restrictions. With these findings, the clues for the classification and definition of the multiple meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ will be established and the detailed analysis of the semantic relatedness and a framed-based analysis will be given in Chapter 5.
4.1 Distributional Frequency of Multi-Faceted dài 帶 ‘bring’
As indicated in the previous chapters, dài 帶 ‘bring’ is a verb that is found to bear multiple meanings. As suggested by Chinese WordNet and with the addition of corpus observation, dài 帶 ‘bring’ is found to exhibit at least nine meaning imports, repeated here as below:
1) To wear (pèidài 佩帶)
布希總統胸腔上帶著電子心臟監聽器，
Bù.Xī-zǒngtong xiōngqiāng-shàng dài zhe diànzi-xīnzàng-jiāntīng.qì
Bush-president chest-on wearASP electric-heart-audio.monitor ‘President Bush wears a cardiac audiomonitor on his chest.’
2) To bring to (dài 帶) 他帶小英去醫院看醫生
tā dài XiăoYīng qù yīyuàn kàn yīsheng he bring Xiăo-Yīng go hospital see doctor
‘He brought Xiao Ying to the hospital to see the doctor.’
3) To lead (dài ling 帶領) 他帶大家唱歌
tā dài dàjiā chàng.gē
he bring every-body sing.song
‘He leads everybody to sing.’
4) To be with (dài yǒu 帶有) 這位女性並不帶男性特徵，
zhè-wèi nǚxìng bìng bú dài nánxìng tèzhēng
this-CL female Adv Neg bring male characteristic
‘This woman does not possess any masculine feature.’
5) To take care of/bring up (zhào gù 照顧、fǔ yang 撫養) 我在家帶兩歲多的女兒，
wǒ zài.jiā dài liăng-suì.duō de nǚér I at-home bring two-year.more DE daughter
‘I was taking care of my two-year-old daughter at home.’
6) To pick up (jiē 接)
民宿的老闆娘還會到車站帶我。
Mínxiŭ de lăobănniáng hái.huì dào chēzhàn dài wǒ Hostel DE hostess still.would arrive station bring me
‘The hostel hostess would come to the station to pick me up.’
7) To bring with (xīdài 攜帶) 他身上帶著護照。
tā shēn shàng dài zhe hùzhào
he body-on bring ASP passport
‘He brought the passport with him.’
8) To activate (dàidòng 帶動) 正妹啦啦隊場邊帶氣氛
zhèng.mèi-lālāduì chăng.biān dàiqìfēn
pretty.girl-cheerleader spot.side bring atmosphere
‘The pretty cheerleaders were activating the atmosphere on the side of the court.’
9) To appear/show with (chéngxiàn 呈現):
每個人的臉上都帶著笑容，
Měi.ge.rén de liăn-shàng dōu dài zhe xiàoróng Everyone DE face-on all bring ASP smile
‘Everybody shows smiles on the face.’
Regarding the nature of polysemy, numerous studies have pointed out that polysemy is a single lexeme with distinct but etymologically related senses (Lyons 1977, 1995, Ravin and Leacock 2000). Also, polysemy is a gradient that straddles the border line between total semantic identity and distinctness and thus there is a meaning common to the sub-meanings (Tuggy 1993, Greeraerts 1993, Deane 1988). Taking dài 帶 ‘bring’ as a polysemic verb, we may thus wonder how the distinct meanings given in 1) to 9) are related to each other and in overall presents a prototype category. That is to say, what might be the predominant core meaning that pertains to the prototypical use
of dài 帶 ‘bring’? In order to explore this issue, the results of the investigation on the distributional frequency of dài 帶 ‘bring’ with respect to various uses and their syntactic patterns are presented as below:
Syntactic Patterns Meaning Count %
NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb + NP3< (VP) Bring to 191/415 46% 46%
Table 4. The Distributional Frequency of the Multi-faceted Uses of dài 帶6
Table 4 shows the grammatical distribution of the syntactic patterns of dài 帶 ‘bring’
and the relevant semantic distinctions they are associated with. It is revealed that dài 帶 ‘bring’ mainly occurs in three syntactic patterns: 1) NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb+NP3<(VP) 2) NP1<帶<NP2<VP and 3) NP1<帶<NP2, and among them the first pattern is the most salient and predominant one (occupied 46%), which is mostly associated with the use of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the sense of bring to. The second and third patterns, serial verb construction (SVC) and simple transitive pattern, occupy about two times less than the first one. In these two patterns, SVC is used
6 The distributional frequency is based on the first 300 and 200 instances of Sinica and Gigawords, among them only 415 entries are taken into account as the usable data. The meaning of pick up and appear/show in dài 帶 are not included in this Table due to their low frequency in occurrence and the limited selected database in distributional frequency count. Nevertheless, they do appear in the corpus and the syntactic pattern they mostly involve pertains to the transitive pattern.
mainly for the sense of bring to, lead, and bring with in nearly equal frequency, while the transitive pattern is associated more freely with all the other senses. But among these uses, the senses of bring with and be with show a higher frequency.
Other from the three major types of constructions dài 帶 ‘bring’ occurs in, it is also observed from the corpus that dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the sense of bring to can participate in the most diverse ranges of syntactic alternations, as shown in the following Table. As for other uses, only dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the sense of lead and bring with are involved with syntactic alternations, such as resultative De construction and locative Zài construction.
Table 5. The Distributional Frequency of the Multi-faceted Uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ with Respect to Syntactic Alternations
Given the distribution of syntactic patterns with the associated meanings, Table 6 provides another view by showing the distribution of the lexical meanings with respect to the possible syntactic patterns they may respectively involve.
Meanings Syntactic Patterns Count Total
Bring to
NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb + NP3< (VP) 191/415 46%
62.2%
NP1<帶<NP2<VP 27/415 6.5%
Bă/Bèi/Ràng/Gěi/De Alternations 43/415 10.4%
Table 6. The Distributional Frequency of the Meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ with Respect to the Syntactic Patterns
It is suggested by Table 6 that though a specific meaning may be realized with one or more syntactic patterns, each meaning is predominantly associated with one specific syntactic form. The semantically significant form of syntactic realization with respect to the major sense distinctions of dài 帶 ‘bring’ will be further discussed in Chapter 5.
Based on the above findings, a crutial fact has been revealed that the predominant meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ include four: bring to, lead, bring with, and be with as indicated by their frequency. But among them, bring to shows the highest frequency and thus is assumed to be the most central and prototypical meaning of dài 帶 ‘bring’.
In the following section, the semantic distinction among the above mentioned predominant meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ will be given in detail in terms of their participant roles and semantic attributes.
4.2 Semantic Distinctions of dài 帶 ‘bring’: Caused-Motion vs. Non-Motional Use
Based on the corpus distributions, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of bring to is found to
Lead
frequently occur in the caused-motion construction where the path of motion is syntactically specified, while other meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ occur in the syntactic patterns that are without the encoding of Path. With the mapping of syntactic form and meaning, we assume that dài 帶 ‘bring’ may denote a caused-motion event in the use of bring to while it can also denote a non-motional event with other senses. In this section, the observation on the semantic distinctions among the caused-motion and non-motional uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ will be presented. Three central meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’, including bring to, lead and bring with will be firstly differentiated in terms of their defining pattern, participant roles and semantic attributes in this section. Based on these observations, the sense correlations among the central and non-central meanings will be further analyzed in detail in Chapter 5.
4.2.1 Dài 帶 ‘bring’ as a Caused-Motion Verb: Bring to
With the syntactic and semantic observation of the corpus data, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of bring to can be defined by the following syntactic pattern and semantic attributes.
4.2.1.1 Defining Pattern and Alternations
As mentioned in Section 4.1, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of bring to most frequently occurs in the caused-motion construction, which is structurally realized as below:
NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb {到/至/入/往/上/下/進/出/回/來/去}+NP3<VP
NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb {到/至/入/往/上/下/進/出/回/來/去}+NP3<VP