On The Polysemy Of Mandarin Chinese Direction Verb-"qilai" In "Verb/Adjective-qilai" Construction-a Cognitive Analysis

This thesis studies one of the most important issues in language research especially in the field of lexical semantics– polysemy by adopting a cognitive linguistic perspective. One of the three hypotheses that guide the cognitive linguistic approach to language is that language is not an autonomous cognitive faculty. It argues that language is governed by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special-purpose language module. The basic corollaries of this hypothesis are that the representation of linguistic knowledge is essentially the same as the representation of other conceptual structures, and that the processes in which that knowledge is used are not fundamentally different from cognitive abilities that human beings use outside the domain of language. Sweetser argues that"words do not randomly acquire new senses", and"since new senses are acquired by cognitive structuring, the multiple synchronic senses of a given word will normally be related to each other in a motivated fashion". What we should do is to find out a motivated account for the relationships between senses of a single word. This is also our aim in this thesis.This thesis investigates the cognitive mechanisms which underlie the semantic change of Chinese direction verb–"qilai"on synchronic corpus data. The Chinese direction verb–"qilai"is shown to have undergone three main semantic shifts: from directional to resultative, from directional to stative, and from directional to evaluative. Due to the co-occurrence of the physical upward movement and the entailed result,"qilai"acquires its resultative meaning. With metonymic and metaphoric extension,"qilai", which originally means"physical upward moving", arrives at its new sense"to start", which indicates a new state. The mapping form the physical domain to speech-act domain also gives rise to the evaluative meaning of"qilai". Further developments have led to the textual function found in such uses as"shuo-qilai","kan-qilai", etc. Another phenomenon accompanying this process is subjectification, which can be found in most cases of semantic change. One of the most important results of subjectification is that it greatly increases the expressiveness of speakers/writers. Studies of subjectification (subjectivity) mainly consist of three arenas: a locutionary agent's perspective, a locutionary agent's expression of affect towards the propositions and a locutionary agent's expression of the modality or epistemic status of the propositions. In our case, speakers'/writers'perspective is the fundamental reason giving rise to subjectification (subjectivity).Through this study, we finally arrive at the following conclusions: (1) the different senses of the direction verb–"qilai"arise from the different construals of the situation; (2) the cognitive mechanisms– frame, metaphor and metonymy and the accompanying phenomenon– subjectification can all be subsumed under the same construal operations– attention and perspective; (3) language just like other cognitive operations is greatly influenced and governed by our general cognitive abilities.