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Cross-Categorial Behaviors of Mandarin Physical Contact Verbs: A Frame-Based Constructional Analysis of qiāodǎ 敲打

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13249))

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Abstract

This study aims to conduct a frame-based and corpus-based analysis on the cross-categorial behaviors of the prototypical Physical Contact verb qiāodǎ 敲打 ‘knock’ and explore the cognitive motivations involved in the semantic extension process. Different from the well-accepted mapping from physical impact to mental impact, qiāodǎ 敲打 ‘knock’ also implies the result or manipulative purpose of mental impact. Therefore, it can be further extended to Communication or Manipulation frame by syntactically coding verbal element or intended act as participant roles. The semantic extension of qiāodǎ 敲打 ‘knock’ is not only motivated by conceptual metaphor, but also by metonymy-based metaphor and accompanied by semantic-syntactic changes. This study analyzes and accounts for the cross-categorial behaviors of qiāodǎ 敲打 ‘knock’ and discusses the involved cognitive motivations and semantic-syntactic criteria for conceptual transfer, which constitutes a major task in the construction of Mandarin VerbNet and plays a significant role in the study of verbal semantics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Literature and Journalism, Central South University, Changsha, China

    Tianqi He

  2. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Tianqi He & Meichun Liu

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  1. Tianqi He
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  2. Meichun Liu
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Correspondence to Tianqi He .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yanhui Gu

  3. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

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He, T., Liu, M. (2022). Cross-Categorial Behaviors of Mandarin Physical Contact Verbs: A Frame-Based Constructional Analysis of qiāodǎ 敲打. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_7

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