Concepts can be ordered and grouped in various ways and be determinedto lie at a different distance from one another (Langacker 1987: 150). Onaccount of the conceptual modulations that occurred in ancient Chinese andMandarin Chinese, it goes without sayin...[继续阅读]

    From ancient Chinese to Mandarin Chinese, the conceptual boundariesbetween pò, qiē, and kāi has finally evolved from conceptual overlapping torelative conceptual discreteness. Across the four targeted stages, conceptualdiscreteness begin to take form at t...[继续阅读]

    Given those unresolved problems in the synchronic investigation on breakverbs, our proposed diachronic study is significant in the following four aspects.First of all, since “diachrony within synchrony equals variation” (Geeraerts1997: 6), a diachronic se...[继续阅读]

    In sum, the categorization of break verbs in generative semantic studies isto a large extent attributed to their syntactic behaviors and their grammaticallyrelevant meaning components, especially to their idiosyncratic ability toparticipate in causative a...[继续阅读]

    Diachronic variation at the peripheral aspect of extensional pò ischaracterized by its flexible adaptability. Such flexible adaptability rendersthe extensional boundary of pò not rigid and allows it to flexibly adapt tochanging circumstances. In spite of ...[继续阅读]

    Frame semantics is another approach employed in the categorial analysisof break verbs. This approach, featured by its treatment of lexical items orconstructions in terms of the frames they evoke (Fillmore 1982, 1985; Fillmoreand Atkins 1992), attends to t...[继续阅读]

    In generative semantics, verbs with flexible ways of argument realizationare called “variable behavior verbs” (Borer 1994). Verbs’ syntactic behavioris a typical diagnostic variable that generative semantic studies make use ofin their categorization of ve...[继续阅读]

    To trace break verbs’ diachronic conceptual variation, this study resorts toCCL corpus (Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU)①. CCL corpus is composedof two sub-corpora, namely the ancient Chinese sub-corpus and the modernChinese sub-corpus. The ancient Chi...[继续阅读]

    First and foremost, eight of the fourteen intensional readings of pò aredeveloped along the lineage of disruptive separation. There exists a closeextensional association between intensional readings like “to win against”,“to take over”, “to succeed” etc. ...[继续阅读]

    In addition to the intensional reading of physical disintegration, anotherfifteen major intensional readings are captured from the dataset of 5,619intensional examples. As shown in Table 6.1, the application domain of pò hasshifted away from the physical ...[继续阅读]