Chapter 3 Database, Theoretical Frameworks, and Methodology
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 1) 學生將不用再帶錢到學校繳註冊費，
xué.sheng jiāng bú yòng zài dài qián dào xuéxiào jiǎo zhùcè.fèi student will NEG use again bring money arrive school pay register.fee
‘Students won’t have to bring the money to school to pay for the
registration fee anymore.’
2) 派出所警員要帶他回派出所指認贓車，
pàichū.suǒ jǐngyuán yào dài tā huí pàichū.suǒ zhǐrèn zāngchē
police.station police.officer is-going bring him back police.station identify stolen.car
‘The police officer is going to bring him back to the police station to identify the stolen car.’
3) 我帶著幾個學生去重慶南路買書。
wǒ dài zhe jǐ.ge xuésheng qù chóngqìngnánlù mǎi shū I bring ASP a few student go Chongqing South Rd. buy book
‘I brought a few students to Chongqing South Road to buy some books.’
In the above syntactic form, the verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ is required to take three argument roles; that are, Subject-NP, Object-NP, and a Coverb followed by an NP, where the Coverb functions to take the directional or deictic meaning in a motion event.
Moreover, a VP may also optionally and sequentially follow the main construction to denote a purpose act following the motion event and thus form a pattern of complex serial verbs. This construction serves as the defining pattern for dài 帶 ‘bring’ in depicting a caused-motion event as it describes a complete motion event where the Agent-Subject brings the Theme-Object to undergo a locational change.
It is also observed that the defining pattern of the caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’
can have the following alternations and the event denoted by which are assumed to be originated from the core pattern mentioned above.
Pattern variations:
a. NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb{來/去}+( )<VP
他要帶我們去( )看您，
tā yào dài wǒmen qù kàn nín he will bring us go see you
‘He is going to take us to pay a visit to you.’
b. NP1<帶<NP2<Coverb{到/至/入/上/下/進/出/回/來/去}+NP3<( )
她們帶他到鄰居家( ) ， tāmén dài tā dào línjū jiā
they bring him arrive neighbor home
‘They brought them to the neighbor’s home.’
c. NP1<帶<NP2<VP<Coverb{到/至/入/往/上/下/進/出/來/去}+NP3
我就儘量帶學生跑到校外去，
wǒ jiù jìn liàng dài xué sheng pǎo dào xiào wài qù I just try-best bring student run arrive campus.outside go ‘I just brought the students to run to the outside of the campus.’
d. NP1<帶<NP2<VP<( )
你帶了秀兒逃命。
nǐ dài le Xiùér táomìng you bring ASP Xiuer run.life
‘You take Xiuer to run for your lifes.’
Besides, the caused-motion pattern is also found with various syntactic alternations that are commonly found in Mandarin Chinese, as listed below:
Transitive Bă -Construction: NP1<把<NP2<帶<Coverb+NP3< (VP)
我們必須把這些裝備帶回國。
wǒmén bìxū bǎ zhè.xiē zhuāngbèi dài huí guó
we must BA these equipment bring back country ‘We must take these equipment back to our country.’
Passive Alternation: NP2<被<NP1<帶<Coverb+NP3< (VP)
去年只有幾名青年被( )帶至台灣。
qùnián zhǐyǒu jǐ.míng qīngnián bèi dài zhì táiwān last year only few teenager BEI bring to Taiwan
‘Last year, only few teenagers were brought to Taiwan.’
Causative Ràng-Construction: NP1<讓<NP2<帶<NP3<Coverb+NP3<VP
她在患病後卻從不讓人帶她到醫院，
tā zài huàn.bìng.hòu què cóngbú ràng rén dài tā dào yīyuàn
she in get.disease.after but-yet-however never let people bring her arrive hospital
‘She never let people to bring her to the hospital after she got the disease.’
LocativeZài-Construction: NP1<把<NP2<帶<在<NP3
他一直把信帶在身上。
tā yì zhí bǎ xìn dài zài shēn shàng he keep BA letter bring in body
‘He keeps bringing the letters with him.’
Dative Alternation: NP1<帶<NP2<給<NP3
我帶了食物和新衣服給她，
wǒ dài le shí wù hé xīn yī fú gěi tā
I bring ASP food and new clothes give her ‘I brought foods and new clothes for her.’
4.2.1.2 Participant Roles
Given the basic syntactic pattern of caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’, it is necessary to see how semantic roles map unto syntactic roles in denoting a prototypical caused-motion event. The core participant roles and the non-core frame elements in the caused-motion frame of dài 帶 ‘bring’ are given and defined as below:
Core Participant Roles:
Agent_Mover [NP]: a sentient being who controls the movement of the theme and has overall motion in directing the motion of the theme
E.g. [父母/Agent_Mover]帶小孩到醫院看病。
Theme_Co-movee [NP]: a person or physical object that undergoes the control of the agent and moves along with the Agent during motion
E.g. a.父母帶[小孩/ Theme_Co-movee]到醫院看病。
b.學生將不用再帶[錢/Theme_Co-movee]到學校繳註冊費，
Cause [NP]: expressions that indicate some non-intentional, typically non-human, force that causes the Theme to be set in motion.
E.g. [滾滾的浪頭/Cause]能帶我出峽、出海，
Location [NP]: a spatial location where the movers ends up after the motion
E.g. 只有在症狀嚴重時，父母才會帶小孩到[醫院/Location]看病。
Target_Act [VP]: the act the agent or the co-movee is about to do after arriving at the final destination
E.g.學生將不用再帶錢到學校[繳註冊費/Target_Act]，
Non-Core Participant Roles:
Source [NP]: the location where the mover or co-movee originates before their change of location
E.g. a. 回國或出國旅客從[停車場/Source]帶著行李到大廳 CHECK–IN
b. 他經常忘記帶錢出[街/Source]，
Manner [VP]: the action that describes a property of the motion of the movers which is not directly related to the trajectory of motion
E.g. 我就儘量帶學生[跑/Manner]到校外去，
Stimulus [CL]: a situation or an entity which arouses the action of an agent E.g. 動物園希望[年假期間天氣能趕快轉好/Stimulus]，好讓家長帶著小 朋友們一起來到動物園和可愛的動物一起歡渡春節。
Body Part [NP]: body part which has an entity on E.g. 他一直把信帶在[身上/Body part]。
Given the defined participant roles of prototypical caused-motion event of dài 帶
‘bring’, the mapping of the core participant roles with the defining pattern can thus be demonstrated as below:
Agent_Mover[NP1]<*<Theme_Co-movee[NP2]<Coverb+Location[NP3]<Targ et_Act[VP]E.g. [學生/Agent_Mover]帶[錢/Theme_Co-movee][到/Path][學校/Location][繳 註冊費/Target_Act]。
xuésheng dài qián dào xuéxiào jiǎo zhùcèfèi student bring money arrive school pay register.fee
‘Students bring the money to school to pay for the registration fee.’
4.2.1.3 Semantic Attributes on Participant Roles
4.2.1.3 Semantic Attributes on Participant Roles