A Frame-based Study On Polysemy Of English Verbs

Frame semantics by C. J. Fillmore is generally considered the third phase of his casegrammar. It contributes a lot to the description of conceptual structure and thesemantics-syntax projection.This study is an exploration of the English verb polysemy on the basis of frame,which, for the sake of convenience, is divided into two types: simple frame andtransferable frame. A simple frame refers mainly to one in which different syntacticpositions of the frame elements may produce an effect on the grammatical meaning of acertain verb. Such kind of frames can be further divided into two subtypes, i.e.,Transitive-based Simple Frame and Intransitive-based Simple Frame. The former includesthe frame activated by the transitive verb shoot, and the latter, the frame by the intransitiveverb ride. Comparatively, a transferable frame refers to one in which the original frameactivated by a verb is likely to shift to other frames via metaphor in accordance with thePrinciple of Least Effort so that the original meaning of the verb is correspondinglychanged.Within a simple frame, the meaning of an English verb, which seems stable on thesurface, may be quite different due to the different appearance of frame elements. Thisdifference is closely related to the prominence of frame elements in syntactic structures.The prominence of frame elements in the transitive-based frame refers mainly to theoccupation of the direct object position through syntactic projection by the frame elementsin a given frame activated by an action or a behavior. The occupation of the objectposition by different frame elements may exert direct effect on the meaning of the verb,thereby resulting in verb polysemy. The prominence of the element in theintransitive-based frame finds expression in the syntactic subject of the sentence thatlinguistically matches the frame. In such a case, the frame element, usually the semanticAGENT, which is most likely to be the syntactic subject of the corresponding sentence, isnormally omitted for the sake of meaning expression. This will result in the alternateappearance of other frame elements in the subject position of the corresponding sentence.The alternation may lead to the nuance of the intransitive verb’s meaning each time. Thisis actually the grammatical meaning of the verb to be explored by this research.In a transferable frame, the frame elements are of instability. The variation of frameelements usually produces direct effect on the lexical meaning of the verb. Because theelements of a transferable frame are unstable, this kind of frame is more abstract than a simple one. For example, the [DELIVER] frame activated by the verb deliver containsseveral transferable sub-frames which are internally related one way or the other, mostlythrough metaphor.This study is a new attempt to apply frame semantics theory to the research ofEnglish verb polysemy in the hope of helping Chinese learners of English to learn Englishverbs.