Previous Works on English Verbs Bring and Carry

Since the polysemic verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ in Mandarin literally corresponds to the English verb bring or carry, it is assumed that this verb may share some similarities and differences to its English equivalents. In this section, two previous works on English verbs bring and carry will be reviewed from two different approaches. Section 2.2.1 reviews Levin’s (1993) alternation-based approach on the classification of bring and carry verbs and Section 2.2.2 introduces the frame-based approach on bring and carry in FrameNet.

2.2.1 Levin (1993): Verbs of Sending and Carrying

Levin (1993) assumes that verbal behaviors, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, provide key evidence to investigate the lexical meaning of verbs. Under this assumption, Levin (1993) sets a pioneering work on the classification of English verb based on the alternative syntactic verbal behaviors.

According to Levin (1993), English verb bring and carry are classified under the Verbs of Sending and Carrying, in which bring and carry are associated with two subclasses.

Table 2 presents the classification of the two verbs:

Verb Class Verbs of Sending and Carrying

Subclass Bring and take Carry Verbs Class

members

bring, take(only) carry, drag, haul, heave, heft, hoist, kick, lug, pull, push, schlep, shove, tote, tow, tug

Examples a. Nora brought the book to the meeting.

b. Nora brought the book from home

a. Amanda carried the package (to New York)

b. *Amanda carried at the package (to New York)

(cf. Nora pushed at/against the chair.)

Table 2. Verbs of Sending and Carrying in Levin (1993)

The verbs bring and take as a subclass has been described as the causative counterparts of come and go. In addition, they are set apart from other verbs by the presence of the deictic component of meaning and the lack of a meaning component that specifies the manner in which the motion is brought out. Moreover, these verbs can also be used as verbs of change of possession brought about by a change of position, as shown by their ability to occur in dative alternation.

(13) Dative Alternation:

a. Nora brought the book to Pamela.

b. Nora brought Pamela the book.

(Levin 1993:134)

As for carry, which is under the subclass of Carry Verbs, has been described as relating to the causation of accompanied motion which must be overtly specified in a prepositional phrase. But differ from other class members that are cross-listed as verbs of exerting force such as push and pull, carry is a verb that does not encode sense of force exertion, as can be seen from the evidence that verbs of exerting force allow conative at phrase while verbs of causation of accompanied motion does not. (e.g. Nora pushed at/against the chair vs. *Amanda carried at the package (to New York))

To sum up the above descriptions, bring and carry have the following shared and distinct characteristics: 1) both are verbs of causative motion that must be specified

overtly by the deictic component in the prepositional phrase, 2) bring does not specify Manner; carry does not encode force exertion. As to the contrast between them, bring can be used as a verb of change of possession brought about by a change of position, while carry seems not, as shown by their contrast in the dative alternation in (14ab) and (14cd):

(14) Dative alternation: bring vs. carry a. Nora brought the book to Pamela b. Nora brought Pamela the book

c. Amanda carried the package to Pamela.

d. ?Amanda carried Pamela the package

2.2.2 Fillmore and Atkins (1992): FrameNet

FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/), created by Charles J. Fillmore and his colleagues in University of California Berkeley, is an online lexical database for English lexicon devised on the basis of frame semantics. It is built up based on the semantic frames of English lexicon, each of which is clearly defined by the core and non-core frame elements together with the support of syntactic evidence extracted from actual texts. In FrameNet, different verbs that share the same frame elements can be in the same semantic frame. Thus, one frame may contain several lemmas of verbs that share similar semantic attributes. Futhermore, FrameNet also shows the associations of different frames by graphing the hierarchical and interrelated structures that demonstrate the frame-to-frame relationships.

According to FrameNet, English verb bring and carry are classified under the Bringing Frame. This frame is defined as follows with an example:

“This frame concerns the movement of a Theme and an Agent and/or Carrier.

The Agent, a person or other sentient entity, controls the shared Path by moving the Theme during the motion. The Carrier may be a separate entity, or it may be the Agent's body.”

e.g. Karl CARRIED the books across campus to the library by truck.

The core frame elements involved in this frame are Agent, Theme, Carrier,

Other from English verbs bring and carry, due to the polysemic nature of dài 帶

‘bring’, the English equivalent lexical units of different meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’

(noted in Section 1.2) can also be associated with multiple frames in FrameNet, which is summarized in Table 3.

English Lexical Units

Semantic Frames Core Frame Elements 1 bring.v Bringing/Causation Agent, Theme, Carrier, Goal,

Path, Source, Area/Actor (Causer), Affected (Effected) 2 carry.v Bringing/Carry_goods Agent, Theme, Carrier, Goal, Path, Source, Area/Distributor, Goods

4 FrameGrapers in the FrameNet shows the connections of several frames, demonstrating the frame-to-frame relationships by different arrows representing respectively the relationships of Inheritance, Using, Precedes, Perspective_on, Inchoative_of, Causative_of, and See_also.

5 In FrameGraper, ‘Using’ relationship refers to a frame that uses part of background information (some core frame elements) of another frame.

3 lead_(to).v

Table 3. English Equivalent Lexical Units of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in FrameNet

Table 3 shows that the use of dài 帶 ‘bring’ may correspond to different verbs in English, which in turn proves that dài 帶 ‘bring’ indeed manifests the cross-frame nature of lexical meanings. Each lexical meaning, under FrameNet, is categorized in different or shared semantic frames with distinct frame-specific elements. For examples, except for Bringing Frame, English verbs bring and carry are also respectively belong to Causation and Carry_goods Frame. Causation Frame describes a background idea where some event is responsible for the occurrence of another event (or state); that is, a Cause or Actor causes an Effect or Affected. As for Carry_goods Frame, it describes a situation where a Distributor sells, lends, or otherwise distributes a class of Goods. And it is noted that the Distributor may carry some particular goods, but may not have it on hand at that exact moment.

FrameNet indeed provides a useful overview of the semantic information regarding bringing verbs in English. Nevertheless, due to the fact that the semantic frames defined in FrameNet are based on English lexicon, the definition and the defined frame elements may not be felicitous in defining the verbal semantics of Mandarin verbs. In addition, FrameNet did not concern the constructional pattern, so the subtle meaning distinction cannot be retrieved and recognized among the different

lexical units within the same frame. Therefore, to complement FrameNet with constructional criteria, this study will incorporate the constructional analysis in order to provide a more comprehensive and fine-grained account for the polysemic verb dài 帶

‘bring’ in Mandarin.