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