A COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF VERBAL POLYSEMY: YAN AND TUN'S FRAME, METAPHOR AND CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Frames are structured correlations extracted from experience. Frames can be used to distinguish words that seemingly denote the same thing and to identify a word that has slightly different denotations (Croft 2004, 2009). Lakoff (1993) argues that conceptual metaphor refers to a mapping from a source domain to a target domain in the conceptual system. The polysemy generalizations of related senses of linguistic expressions are an evidence of the existence of a conceptual metaphor system. Following Croft‘s division of the eating process (intake, processing, and ingestion), yan (咽) and tun (吞) in Chinese both are involved with the INGESTION frame. This thesis aims to investigate how these two semantically close polysemic verbs‘ literal and metaphoric usages are historically developed and how they are established in modern Chinese under frame and metaphor theory. Are these two verbs involved with similar source domains and target domains? Do the frames and constructions they are associated with crucially influence their similarities and differences?