A Corpus-based Study Of Luminance Terms In English And Chinese:A Cognitive Semantic Approach

This dissertation models the semantics of some basic luminance terms,i.e.,the polysemous luminance adjectives and the near-synonymous luminance verbs,in English and Chinese.It endeavors to reveal the semantic relations and structure of the terms by taking the Cognitive Semantic approach,and illuminate the question of how light is conceptualized and used to construe other phenomena in both languages.The methodology used belongs to the distributional corpus-based approach,which holds that similar distributional contexts of senses or linguistic forms reflect semantic similarity.The main body of this dissertation is devoted to an empirical semantic investigation,which aims to create the semantic profile of the terms by referring to dictionaries,the WordNet and the FrameNet on the one hand,and applying the fine-grained approaches of behavioral profile and constructional profile on the other.The two objectives to be achieved are:(1)starting from the semasiological standpoint,the study attempts to examine how different senses of the polysemous luminance adjectives relate to each other and the cognitive mechanisms that motivate the semantic extension by adopting the behavioral approach,as well as register variation and cross-modality interaction of the senses;and starting from the onomasiolocical standpoint,it attempts to investigate the synonymous relations between luminance verbs from the perspective of constructional profile.In so doing,the study seeks to explore how the terms resemble and differ intra-linguistically and cross-linguistically;(2)based on the semantic analyses,the study aims to articulate the conceptualization of the light phenomenon.The major findings are:Firstly,for luminance adjectives,their senses are closely linked:in addition to a common prototypical sense of light,the adjectives in both languages uniformly develop a number of metonymic senses,which have been corroborated by agglomerative hierarchical clustering to be closer to the prototypical sense than the metaphorical senses.Semantic contents common to all words are light,color,prospect,emotion,explicitness of mental perception,intelligence,fame and sound.Luminance adjectives tend to be affectively loaded:those denoting brightness are usually invested with positive connotations while those designating darkness tend to be negatively oriented.Furthermore,bright and dark are found to be more multimodal,as they are extended beyond the original visual modality to most other perceptual domains,whereas ming(明)and an(暗)barely modify nouns from the tactile and gustatory domains.As regards how light is conceptualized,the conceptualization pattern that emerges from the semantic study is that light is stationery.Secondly,for luminance verbs,similar constructional profiles reflect semantic similarity.The constructional pattern common to English and Chinese luminance verbs is the intransitive form.Analyses of the constructional collexemes in both languages confirm most of the metonymic and metaphorical patterns identified in the studies of luminance adjectives.The nominal collexemes indicate that luminance verbs are not as multimodal as the adjectives,and there is cross-linguistic difference in modality transfer:apart from describing nouns of visual domain,luminance verbs in English co-occur with nouns of the auditory modality,and those in Chinese are found to involve in the auditory and olfactory domains.Concerning the conceptualization of light,the collexemes of English particles and Chinese directional verbs suggest that light is conceptualized as a goal-oriented movement that fits the image schema of SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and that the light source is often conceived of as a container.Possible reasons for the semantic similarities and differences are offered from various perspectives.It is speculated that common physiological structure of human,similar and/or idiosyncratic natural emvironment,varied cultural and social milieu,language contact,language structure and many other important factors all have a role to play in the process of semantic development and are responsible for the similarities and differences.By presenting a semantic description of some basic luminance terms,this dissertation is expected to shed some light on the issue of universality of sensory perception and its lexicalization.Methodologically,it represents an attempt to apply both approaches to the semantic studies of Chinese terms,which yields some sensible and interpretable results as in the case of English studies.