A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Polysemy Of The Psycho-Verbs “Xiǎng” In Chinese And “Think” In English

As a universal linguistic phenomenon,polysemy has always been a popular topic for semanticists and morphologists.The main contribution of early structuralist linguistics to the study of polysemy is to put forward the concept of semantic field,and advocate to determine the meaning of a word by analyzing and comparing the semantic relationship between words.Later,the development of cognitive linguistics has opened a new door for the study of polysemy.Cognitive linguistics can clearly reveal the origin and essence of polysemous words,providing a new perspective for the study of polysemy.This thesis applies the corpus-based behavioral profile analysis to systematically compare the polysemy of English and Chinese psycho-verbs think and xiǎng,with an aim to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the prototypical meanings,the semantic networks and the degree of sense distinctions of English and Chinese psycho-verbs think and xiǎng respectively?(2)What are the similarities and differences between the senses of think and xiǎng?(3)What are the motivations underlying their similarities and differences? To answer the above questions,this research firstly extracts 2000 instances of Chinese xiǎng and English think from the spoken corpus of CCL and BNCweb Corpus respectively.Then,non-verb data were excluded by manual selection and a total of 1523 Chinese instances and 1318 English instances were finally obtained.After identifying their senses and behavioral characteristics,all the corpus data are annotated manually.Finally,hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis is adopted to statistically analyze the annotated data.The findings of the present study are presented in the following:Firstly,the prototypical meaning of the Chinese psycho-verb xiǎng is to ponder and its 14 senses can be classified into two categories: cognition and emotion,which can further be categorized into four sub-types.Besides,it has been found that there are two main linking mechanisms between the senses of xiǎng.On the one hand,it extends from ‘to ponder’ to other cognitive meanings by conceptual metonymy.On the other hand,senses expressing emotions and feelings are extended from the meaning of ‘ponder’ by conceptual metaphor.Secondly,the prototypical meaning of the English psycho-verb think is also‘ponder’,but all of its senses can only refer to cognitive activities,without the emotional meaning.Besides,the senses of think can also be classified into two categories: the process of thinking and the result of thinking,which can be further divided into four sub-categories.Different from the Chinese xiǎng,the cognitive mechanism among the senses of think is only conceptual metonymy.On the one hand,senses expressing the process of thinking(such as ‘consider’,‘keep something in mind’)are extended from ‘to ponder’ by conceptual metonymy(PROCESS FOR ACTION).On the other hand,senses representing the result of thinking(such as‘remember’,‘have opinion’)are extended by conceptual metonymy(RESULT FOR ACTION).Thirdly,based on the comparative analysis,it has been found that the semantic extension of English and Chinese psycho-verbs think and xiǎng has both the similarities and differences.First of all,the two words share most of the same senses and their meaning extension is mainly motivated by conceptual metonymy.As for the differences,think and xiǎng have several different senses.And according to the cluster dendrogram,the senses of xiǎng can be classified into two categories: cognition and emotion.But all the senses of think can only represent cognitive activities,without any emotional sense.In addition,although the senses of xiǎng are primarily extended by conceptual metonymy,it also includes conceptual metaphor,which has not been shown in the senses of think.Finally,the reason why psycho-verbs think and xiǎng have most of the same senses is that both English and Chinese people have the same experience of thinking.Brain is the organ for thinking and this common physiological structure produces the similar experience of thinking between Chinese and English people.According to cognitive semantics,human experience of the world plays a vital role in the generation of meaning.The similarity of meaning comes from the similar human experience of the world,which is based on the similar physiological structure.Besides,the difference in semantics between the two verbs can be explained by the differences in the following aspects like cultural traditions,cognitive models,and language characteristics between English and Chinese people.In Western culture,the mind is the locus of thoughts,while the heart is the seat of emotions.However,heart and mind were conceptualized as one in ancient Chinese philosophy,including thoughts and feelings.Therefore,in addition to the similar senses with English,the Chinese verb xiǎng can express emotions and feelings,such as “miss” and “be concerned about”.Taking the English and Chinese psycho-verbs think and xiǎng as examples,this thesis conducts a comparative study of their polysemy by corpus-based behavioral profile analysis.It is not only helpful to promote the corpus quantitative research of mental verbs,but also provides some guidance for lexical teaching and lexicography.