Chapter 4 Findings
4.3 Collocation Patterns
4.3.2 Collocation Patterns of Non-motional Uses of Dài 帶 ‘bring’
As for dài 帶 ‘bring’ in non-motional uses, some specific collocation patterns are found to be subject to the uses of lead, bring with and be with in the senses of dài 帶
‘bring’.
When dài 帶 ‘bring’ denotes the sense of lead, three collocation patterns are found. First, the purpose for the leading act will usually be specified. Therefore, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the sense of lead often collocates with a purpose event, as shown by the contrast in 1).
1) Collocation with a Purpose Event a. 媽媽帶著幾個女兒在家織布。
māma dài zhe jǐ.ge nǚér zài jiā zhībù
mom bring ASP few daughter in home sewing
‘The mother leads the daughters to do the sewing at home.’
b. ??媽媽帶女兒在家 māma dài nǚér zài jiā
mom bring daughter in home
??‘The mother is leading the daughter at home.’
Secondly, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the sense of lead often collocates with a resultative
verb, such as hăo 好 ‘good,’ qǐ 起 ‘up,’ dòng 動 ‘move,’ to specify the resultative state of a leading event, and these verbs usually combine with the main verb dài 帶
‘bring’ to form a compound verb.
2) Collocation with a Resultative Verb:
創意素人帶起環保精神 (Google 2014/04/13) chuàngyì.sùrén dài.qǐ huánbǎo-jīngshén
creativity-ordinary.people bring.up environmental.protection-spirit
‘The spirit of environmental protection has been brought up by the ordinary people with extraordinary creativity.’
In addition, it is also observed that when used to refer to a leading event , dài 帶
‘bring’ can collocate with a manner adverb that specifies the attitude of the Subject, such as nŭlì-de 努力的 ‘hard-working’, or qínkuài-de 勤快的 ‘diligent’, as shown below:
3) Collocation with an Attitudinal Manner Adverb:
爸爸媽媽勤快的帶著小朋友收割稻草，
bàba māma qínkuà- de dài zhe xiǎopéngyǒu shōugē dàocǎo father mother diligently bring ASP children harvest rice
‘Parents lead the children diligently to harvest the rice.’
Other from the use of lead, two collocation patterns are also found with dài 帶
‘bring’ in the sense of bring with. The first is that dài 帶 ‘bring’ frequently co-occurs with the manner verb that specifies a hand motion, such as jiá 挾 and xī 攜. These verbs bear the similar meaning as ‘carry’ but are further specified with the style or way
through which the Theme is being carried. They are usually syntactically incorporated with the verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ to surface as a compound, such as shown below:
4) Collocation with the Manner Verb of Hand Motion a. 风挟带着沙砾袭击岩石和断崖
fēng jiá.dài zhe shālì xíjí yánshí hé duànyái wind carry ASP gravel attack rock and cliff
‘The wind carried with gravels attacks the rocks and cliffs.’
b. 要隨身攜帶麥克筆跟白紙！
yào suíshēn xīdài màikèbǐ gēn báizhǐ
need along.body carry.carry marker and white.paper
‘Be sure to carry the markers and plain papers with you.’
Secondly, when dài 帶 ‘bring’ is extended to refer to a stative relation with the extension of its sense from ‘bring with’ to ‘be with’, dài 帶 ‘bring’ is found to be able to collocate with the preverbal degree adverb, such as wèi 微 ‘slight,’ or yǒudiăn 有 點 ‘a little,’ as shown below:
5) Collocation with a Degree Adverb
a. 經過特別醃製的豬肉片微帶甜和辣的味道。
jīngguò tèbié yānzhì de zhūròu.piàn wéi dài tián-hé-là de wèidào
through special pickle DE pork.slice little bring sweet-and-spicy DE taste
‘The pickled pork have a little bit taste of sweet and spicy.’
b. 這..內容..有點帶髒 (Google 2008/07/28) zhè nèiróng yǒudiǎn dài zāng
this content a-little-bit bring dirty
‘This content is a little bit dirty.’
The degree marker is used to mark the degree to which the Agent possesses the entity or property denoted by the Theme. Thus, it is found that such a marker is only acceptable to collocate with dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the non-motional use with the relatively stative meaning be with.
According to the above, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in similar but distinct meanings indeed show with different collocational behaviors. With the interaction between the collo-construction and lexical meaning, the semantic properties or event types of the multi-faceted dài 帶 ‘bring’ can thus be even more clearly revealed. In the next chapter, a detailed semantic analysis will be given to account for the semantic correlations among different uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ along with the support of the collo-constructional behaviors mentioned in this section.
Chapter 5
Semantic Analysis on the Polysemic Dài 帶 ‘Bring’
This chapter presents a frame-based constructional analysis of the multiple uses of dài 帶 ‘bring’ with a cognitive semantic perspective. Section 5.1 describes the prototypical use of dài 帶 ‘bring’ with a conceptual schema, which serves as the semantic base for other various semantic profilings and extensions. Section 5.2 gives the account for the semantic relations of subtypical meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ based on the prototype, and presents the semantic-to-syntactic correlations among them. The overlapping cases of sense interpretations will also be accounted for. Section 5.3 shows the semantic extensions of dài 帶 ‘bring’ from the three central meanings, bring to, lead, and bring with, proposing that the non-central meanings are derived based on the semantic features of the participant roles or via different semantic profilings. Section 5.4 summarizes the interrelationship of the multiple meanings of dài 帶 ‘bring’ by displaying the hierarchical structure of sense relations. Section 5.5 gives the frame-based account by introducing the conceptual schema of caused-motion frame and the hierarchical structure of the framing system with the focus on the Co-movement frame, and Section 5.6 summarizes this chapter.
5.1 The Semantic Base: the Prototype of Caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’
Based on the findings presented in the previous chapter, it has shown that dài 帶
‘bring,’ though polysemic in nature, is found to be used most frequently to describe a caused-motion event, as supported by the distrubutional frequency. Therefore, we postulate that the prototype of dài 帶 ‘bring’ falls in denoting a conceptual caused-motion event, endowing dài 帶 ‘bring’ with the meaning of bring to. In view
of the conception of semantic base and profile proposed by Langacker (1987), dài 帶
‘bring’ in the prototypical caused-motion use can thus be postulated as a semantic base for the predication of other uses. With different profilings of designated entities, the prototype of dài 帶 ‘bring’ may be extended to include other subtypical meaning facets with different focal points. In this section, the semantic base of the caused-motion event will be conceptually defined with a given schematic structure, which serves as the backgrounded knowledge base for identifying the event of dài 帶
‘bring’ and provides a ground for the derivation of other related senses.
5.1.1 The Conceptual Schema of Caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’
As defined in Section 4.2.1, dài 帶 ‘bring’ prototypically describes an caused-motion event in which an Agent human brings a Theme human or entity to move to a spatial location to do a target act following a path. At the meantime, the Agent is the Mover who has the control of the Theme and the Theme is the Co-movee who moves along with the Agent Mover completely during the motion. A conceptual schema is given to represent the prototypical event of caused motion designated by dài 帶 ‘bring’, as shown below:
Figure 3. The Prototype Conceptual Schema for Caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’
The above schema represents the prototype of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in depicting a
prototypical caused-motion event. The entire event is completed only when the CAUSER Subject, an Agent human, firstly takes control over the CAUSEE, the Theme human or object (as indicated by ‘>’), and then moves them to a specific spatial location (i.e., GOAL) through a surface Path (as indicated by the first black arrow).
Sometimes the entire event is followed by an act (i.e., Target Act) that the Agent or Theme is about to do at the spot of their final location (as indicated by the second black arrow). On the other hand, dài 帶 ‘bring’ requires the Agent to move together with the Theme along a path completely during the motion (as indicated by the oval with the dotted arrow followed). Therefore, the Agent and Theme bear the relation of Mover and Co-movee. An example can be seen from the sentence: xuésheng dài qián dào xuéxiào jiǎo zhùcèfèi [ 學 生 /Agent_Mover] 帶 [ 錢 Theme_Co-movee] 到 [ 學 校 /Location][繳註冊費/Target_Act] ‘Students bring the money to the school to pay for the registration fee.’
When used for a caused-motion event, it is observed that the spatial and motional goal of the bringing event can also be extended to denote a non-motional goal. Such a non-spatial goal is mostly referred to as an abstract location that can be reached without spatial movement, as illustrated below:
(18) 人民公社把社員們帶向人類歷史上最高的仙境，
rénmíngōngshè bǎ shèyuán.men dài xiàng rénlèi-lìshǐ-shàng zuì.gāo de xiānjìng
people.commune BA members bring to human-history-on most.high DE wonderland
‘The People’s Commune has led the commune members to the greatest wonderland in human history.’
In this non-prototypical use, dài 帶 ‘bring’ has been metaphorically transferred to the non-spatial and non-motional domain in which no physical movement is involved.
Therefore, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in this case may also bear the meaning of lead7 as the Agent-subject brings and thus leads the Theme-object towards a certain non-spatial goal.
On the basis of the definition of the prototype, we suggest that the core semantic base of caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’ conceptually represents a co-motion event where the Agent and the Theme undergo a movement at the same time during the motion. In the following sections, the semantic extensions in relation to the semantic base of dài 帶 ‘bring’ in caused-motion domain will be semantically analyzed along with constructional evidence.
5.2 The Semantic Profiles: the Subtypes of dài 帶 ‘bring’
According to the semantic and syntactic observations given in Chapter 4, dài 帶
‘bring’ is also found to frequently denote two other meanings: lead (dài ling 帶領) and bring with (xīdài 攜帶). With the mapping of both semantic and syntactic roles, it is defined that dài 帶 ‘bring’ depicts an event where an Agent leads the Theme to do an act in the sense of lead, while dài 帶 ‘bring’ describes an event where the Agent human brings the Theme entity along with him/her in the sense of bring with. But how are these two meanings related to the prototypical meaning of dài 帶 ‘bring’? This study proposes that they are generated via the mechanism of the semantic profilings,
7 The overlapping senses of bring to and lead in this case was kindly pointed out by Prof. Han-chun Huang. In this study, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of lead is defined as involving an Agent leading a Theme to do an act (please refer to section 5.2), but it is also pointed out that the leadership relations can also be realized in the caused-motion event when the goal of motion is metaphorically transferred to a non-motional goal. Hence, the leading event may also describe an event of the Agent leading a Theme to a certain non-spatial goal.
where different perspectives of the main scope of the prototype of dài 帶 ‘bring’ is emphasized. In this section, the semantic extension from the prototypical dài 帶 ‘bring’
to the subtypical meanings lead and bring with will be discussed.
5.2.1 The Subtype 1: the Sense of Lead (dàiling 帶領)
Given the conceptual basis of the prototypical dài 帶 ‘bring’, this section aims to discuss the leading sense in relation to the caused-motional bringing event. For a leading event, it has been defined that a typical leading event involves a Leader controling and taking the lead of the Leadee to do or perform a certain act. Thus, a typical leading event can be represented by the following conceptual schema.
Figure 4. The Conceptual schema for Leading dài 帶 ‘bring’
But what is the relation of such a leading event born with the caused-motion event encoded by dài 帶 ‘bring’? A cognitive semantic account is given in the following section.
5.2.1.1 Semantic Relation between Bring to and Lead
As mentioned in the above sections, dài 帶 ‘bring’ itself forms a prototypical semantic category which describes a caused-motion event where the co-movement of
both Agent and Theme takes place. In view that a schematic representation of the conceptual core of a category can be understood as a prototype and that a prototype may be applied to the cluster of central members that share similar attributes (Taylor 1995), we assume that the subtypical meaning of dài 帶 ‘bring’ that describes an event of leading may share some central features of the caused-motion event. In other words, the leading event of dài 帶 ‘bring’ must possess some certain semantic attributes that partially resemble to the prototype event. A question then thus rises as to what are the shared semantic attributes of the prototype and subtype event of dài 帶 ‘bring’.
The semantic attributes shared by both events may pertain to the concurrent movement of Agent and Theme encoded by the prototypical caused-motion event.
What is involved is a semantic transfer from co-motion to co-action. As the co-motion event itself implies the co-action of the Agent and Theme, the leading event profiles the initiative role of an Agent leading a Theme to reach a goal without physical movement. That is, the spatial translocational co-motion may be transfered to denote a non-spatial co-action, as can be seen from the following examples:
(19) a. Co-motion: [老師/Agent_Mover]帶著[小朋友/Theme_Co-movee]到[博 物館/Location][寫生/Target_Act]
lǎoshī dài zhe xiǎopéngyǒu dào bówùguǎn xiěsheng teacher bring ASP children arrive museum sketch
‘The teacher brings a group of children to the museum to do the sketch.’
b. Co-action: [老師/Leader]帶著[一群小朋友/Leadee]在[寫生/Led Act]
lǎoshī dài zhe yìqún xiǎopéngyǒu zài xiěsheng teacher bring ASP a.group children in sketch
‘The teacher is leading a group of children to do the sketch.’
Based on the event of (19a), we postulate that the sense of lead in (19b) is arised from the backgrounding of the locational goal of the motion event and the semantic profiling of the co-action between the Mover and Movee. With the locational goal being backgrounded, the leading dài 帶 ‘bring’ no longer specifies the motional path of how the Agent and Theme moves, but instead, it only emphasizes on the action that are done together by Agent and Theme. In such a case, the semantic relation of Agent and Theme is extended to designate as a Leader and Leadee, where the former initiates the Led Act while leading the latter. A related conceptual schema is given to represent the semantic relation of bring to and lead, as shown below:
Figure 5. The Conceptual Schema for Leading dài 帶 ‘bring’ in Relation to Bring to
With the semantic base of the conceptual leading event, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of lead can also profile the leadership relation between the participants. There appear to be two possible leading relations. When the Purpose Act (Led Act) of the Agent and Theme is backgrounded, the leading event highlights the leadership relations between Leader and Leadee, while with the Leadee being backgrounded, what the leading event emphasizes turns to be the leadership relation between the Agent Leader and Led Act, which is usually used to designate a certain activity. Examples of the above
two relations can be seen as below:
(20) [老師/Leader]在帶[一群小朋友/班/Leadee]
lǎoshī zài dài yìqún xiǎopéngyǒu/bān teacher in bring a.group children/class
‘The teacher is taking over a group of children/a class.
(21) [老師/Leader]在帶[寫生/活動/唱歌/Led Act]
lǎoshī zài dài xiěshēng/huódòng/change teacher in bring sketch/activity/singing
‘The teacher is leading (someone) to do the sketch/activity/singing.’
The leadership relations can usually be identified by the role differences between the Agent and Theme in terms of agentivity or social status. For instance, the Agent and Theme can usually be in a superior-subordinate relationship (e.g. lǎoshī 老師
‘teacher’ vs. xuéshēng 學生 ‘student’/ xuézhǎng 學長 ‘senior student’ vs. xuédì 學 弟 ‘junior student’). Nevertheless, there also exist some semantic constraints on the Theme Object in describing a leading event with leadership relations beinging highlighted. For example, the Theme object in a nonprototypical case is only limited to be a generic noun and its semantic feature is only restricted to denote a group of people (e.g. bān 班 ‘class’/yuángong 員工 ‘employee’/yánjiù 研究 ‘research’).
Such a constraint may be ascribed to the fact that such a leading event is a non-central and less prototypical event that is abstracted from the physical co-action event.
5.2.1.2 The Semantic-to-Syntactic Correlation
Given the conceptual specification of the semantic correlations of dài 帶 ‘bring’
in the sense bring to and lead, this section aims to further provide an evidential
constructional account. As have seen in the grammatical distributions given in Chapter 4, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of bring to mostly occurs in the caused-motion pattern where the path of motion is structurally realized in the non-predicate verb, and such a pattern is found to be associated with various syntactic alternations. On the other hand, dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of lead, as a subtypical event of caused-motion dài 帶 ‘bring’, is found to mainly occur in a simple serial verb construction realized as NP1<帶<NP2<VP or a transitive pattern, sometimes with resultative constructions as an alternation.
According to the grammatical performances, a crucial fact has been revealed that the semantic meaning are crucially defined by the syntactic behaviors of the verb. It is noted that the prototypical dài 帶 ‘bring’ mostly occurs in the Mandarin caused-motion construction. In view that a caused-motion construction is associated with the meaning ‘X CAUSES Y TO MOVE Z’ as defined by Goldberg (1995), it is assumed that the verb dài 帶 ‘bring’ is mostly associated with a caused-motion sense in the construction. With the fusion of participant roles of the lexical frame of dài 帶
‘bring’ and the argument roles of the construction, dài 帶 ‘bring’ thus denotes a prototypical caused-motion event in the sense of bring to.
On the other hand, since dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of lead only occurs in the basic serial verb construction or a basic transitive pattern without the direction or path of motion beinging realized, we may consequently assume that leading dài 帶 ‘bring’ is
On the other hand, since dài 帶 ‘bring’ in the use of lead only occurs in the basic serial verb construction or a basic transitive pattern without the direction or path of motion beinging realized, we may consequently assume that leading dài 帶 ‘bring’ is