Search

For Malay, when no contextual clues are given, a lexical form can be confusing because sometimes it can have more than one meaning. We postulated that most confusing meanings can be disambiguated through observing their morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures. We used corpus data and analyzed the possible features of takut ‘fear’ that can help decide which form of takut in Malay to choose. If a default lexical verb meaning is intended (i.e., the original meaning), the feature [Experiencer-(Stimulus)] is needed and the takut (v) form is used. If a causative meaning is intended, the men-(t)akut-kan form is used. If a passive meaning is intended, there are some possibilities, as the choice could depend on the syntax of the passive form, such as whether the [Experiencer] is a first- or second-person pronoun (e.g., benda itu saya takut-i ‘the thing feared by me’) or other pronouns (e.g., benda itu paling di-takut-i oleh-nya ‘that thing feared most by him/her’) or whether an adversative meaning is intended ([ke- -an] form). We propose that both the morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures of takut need to be considered to better understand the use of the different meanings of Malay derived and inflected forms.

The polysemous adverb just is frequently used by efl learners, but many learners are still unaware of how just should be used. The aim of this study is to examine how frequently different meanings of the adverb just are employed by native speakers and Taiwanese efl learners in their essays and to identify the differences in the lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing data from one native-speaker corpus and two Taiwanese efl learner corpora, we investigated ( i) the overall frequencies of just, ( ii) the frequencies of just by meaning categories, and ( iii) the lexico-grammatical patterns of the different meanings of just, as well as their semantic and syntactic features. Results showed that the overall frequencies of just were similar in the native speaker and learner corpora, but there was a smaller variety of the use of adverbial just in the learner corpora. By examining the lexico-grammatical patterns, we found that the meanings of the adverbial just were induced in the following patterns: first, when it modified different syntactic structures; secondly, when it co-occurred with specific contextual clues; and, thirdly, when it interacted with particular tense/aspect of a verb. In addition, semantic features and lexical choices had a pivotal role in determining whether the use of a particular sense of just was acceptable in a sentence. By providing corpus-based teaching material for the uses of adverbial just, it is hoped that our study will shed light on the perplexing issue of adverb acquisition.

This study examined 25 emotion terms in Malaysian Malay and used corpus data to investigate whether these emotion terms appeared with the [meN-], [meN‑ -i], [meN‑ -kan], and [‑kan]-only forms. The emotion terms were patterned in four different ways. Category One included local emotion verbs that conformed to the pattern [Affector-Affectee]. In this category, the verbs were dominated by the [meN‑ -i] form, with a small number including the suffix [‑kan]-only. A verb in the [meN‑ -kan] form was either a Category Two [Causer meN‑ -kan Causee] pattern or a Category Four [Experiencer meN‑ -kan Event] pattern, among which Category Two had a higher number of instances. Category Three included two possible patterns – [Experiencer meN‑ -i Stimulus] and [Experiencer meN‑ (Stimulus absent)]. We found that the emotion terms with the [meN-]-only form were largely “narrating” the emotions of the speaker or situation, which provided the background, while the emotion terms with the [‑kan]-only form were largely “proposing” the emotion of the speaker or the subject being referred to (cf. Hopper 1983; Bambang Kaswanti Purwo 1988). We were able to discern not only emotion terms in Malay but also their different uses in [meN-], [meN‑ -i], [meN‑ -kan], and [‑kan]-only forms.

Durative events by default are atelic. However, temporal targets are typically required for durative verbs with a rushing manner, such as ‘We are catching the 3:30 flight’ and ‘The farmer rushed to harvest before the storm’. Why and how does manner introduce delimiting temporal concepts to durative verbs? This puzzle is addressed by our current study of two near-synonymous Mandarin durative verbs describing events carried out in a rushing manner: 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng. Our event-based account will examine both their compositional meanings and their constructional patterns. We will show that 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng not only coerce eventive readings from their nominal objects, but also require certain delineating temporal targets. The verb 赶 gǎn requires an understood deadline, while the verb 抢 qiǎng requires the presupposition of the limited availability of the object. As neither temporal targets mark the time of the actual activities, these are exceptional cases of aktionsart. We will show that the different ways to delineate event meanings of the constructions [gǎn/qiǎng+ noun] can be predicted from the lexical meaning of the two verbs and can in turn predict the event types represented by the object with the MARVS theory. Based on this lexical semantic representation, we further show that the Generative Lexicon theory predicts the coercions of the rushing meaning from the original activity verb senses, and that the Construction Grammar theory accounts for their sharing of the same syntactic configuration.

Hēi diào ‘to turn black’ (黑掉) denotes a change-of-state meaning, but in social media, it has a special pragmatic use that emphasizes “bad consequences” following an uncooperative act, whether right or wrong. This metaphorical and new transitive use of hēi diào, which is unique among netizens, has changed the literal status of hēi ‘black’ to other additional accomplishment/achievement meanings. Our study examined the expression hēi diào using data from a social media corpus, the PTT Bulletin Board System. We also analysed all the constructions of hēi diào and similar [V diào (掉)] patterns in the corpus. Unlike most previous work, which analysed the uses of [V diào] only, our study observed pragmatic connotations of hēi diào in social media—uses that only materialized in certain contexts.

While substantial corpus-based studies have been performed on near synonyms in general texts from a wide variety of spoken and written languages, there have been few attempts to explore synonymous words in a specific genre. Using the subcorpus of academic writing in the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the source data, this study is aimed at examining the syntactic and semantic environments of two frequent near-synonymous verbs, PROPOSE and SUGGEST, from three aspects: (i) frequency patterns, (ii) subject animacy, and (iii) the grammatical features of four verb forms. Hierarchical configural frequency analysis (HCFA) was employed to reveal the significant combinations of the interactions among these three factors. The major findings showed that the two verbs were somewhat similar in terms of preferred patterns; however, the distributions of their frequent animate/inanimate subjects and the grammatical features of the top patterns were different. This research will be beneficial in raising students’ awareness of the recurrent phraseologies in academic written discourse since it provides a systematic delineation of the different habitual collocations and syntactic constructions of two frequent and similar verbs in research articles.

“*I am not agree with you” is an incorrect use of agree frequently seen in the writing of Taiwanese learners. Yet, not many studies have discussed the use of agree and disagree in the literature. Many studies are concerned more about the politeness of (dis)agreement, especially in detailing the relationship between speaker and hearer. We took a lexical semantic approach to compare the use of agree and disagree in essays written by native English speakers and Taiwanese learners in the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English). The essays were based on two topics concerning societal issues collected in the corpus – (a) whether smoking should be completely banned in restaurants and (b) whether college students should take a part-time job or not – the writers were asked to respond to each issue by agreeing or disagreeing. Our results showed that when given clear instructions to agree or disagree, both native and learners tended to state (dis)agreement in the very first sentence in their essays, but Taiwanese learners relied more on the uses of agree and disagree more often than the native speakers did. The errors committed by learners on the use of agree (not for disagree) were between 25–35% in our data. The results will bring significant comparisons of the lexical semantics of related verbs (verbs of social interaction) in future studies.

Lagi, a less studied Malay adverb, has meanings such as ‘in addition’, ‘again’, ‘more’, and ‘yet/still’. We aimed to see how these meanings could be related in a single word and to find the conceptualization and grammatical paths involved. We also intended to find out whether this word carries any underlying meanings not specified in dictionaries. In the corpus, although many examples have lagi in the sentence-final position, some unconventional sentence-initial uses were also found in news headlines. We found that lagi serves a special function in news headlines, emphasizing the repeatedness of events that were often negative or undesirable. The seemingly unrelated meanings of lagi can be categorized based on three meaning concepts – addition/more meaning, less-more continuum, and temporal lagi (‘yet/still’, ‘again’). In addition to these concepts, we also found several possible grammaticalization paths that contribute to the different uses of lagi.

Metaphors are pervasive in human language, but the understanding of metaphors still poses a challenge for artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and linguistics. To understand metaphorical expressions, a metaphor resource is important. Among different metaphorical expressions, the mapped concepts of kind metaphors (‘x is a kind of y’) provide important knowledge resources for metaphor understanding. In this study, we examined the correlation between metaphoricity and concept distance in kind metaphors. We first automatically captured the mapped nominal concepts in 144 kind metaphor sentence candidates using parsing, and then estimated the concept distance using ConceptNet. Three annotators then rated the degree of metaphoricity of these sentences using a 5-point Likert scale. The results indicated a significant negative correlation between concept distance and metaphoricity, implying that the shorter the concept distance, the higher the metaphoricity of the expression. Our findings showed that kind metaphors form a different type of metaphorical mapping.

The occurrences of kill and killer are often understood as negative; however, evidence suggests that these words also have positive meanings. To many people, the use of kill and killer indicates physical death, but we found other meanings of these words. First, death is the worst possible outcome, but it is not necessarily a consequence of kill and killer. Second, killer, in particular, has a strong positive meaning that is extended from the ‘deadly’ meaning of kill. Third, we found that the figurative use of killer appeared more often in magazines and newspapers, as well as in fiction but with different purposes, when we compared the data from magazines and newspapers with those from different genres. The results obtained by analysing magazine and newspaper corpora in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) showed the importance of pragmatic interpretation in understanding meanings.

This chapter introduces research on metaphors in Chinese, encompassing both theoretical and applied studies of metaphor, with a particular focus on metaphor research in the fields of computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and lexical semantics. Cultural and cross-cultural analyses of metaphors are also presented, along with a brief overview of metaphor studies in translation, advertising, and counselling.

Author/s Siaw-Fong Chung F.Y. August Chao Tien-Yu Lan Yen-Yu Lin National Chengchi University, Taiwan ABSTRACT This paper investigates twenty-two prepositions in two different lexical bundles – [PREPOSITION the NOUN of] (at the point of, from the perspective of, etc.) and [VERB PREPOSITION the NOUN of] (shouted above the noise of, suffering from the effects of, etc.), the only difference being that the former does not include the head verb that is present in the latter. Strings of constructions were extracted from the British National Corpus and the types of possible verbs, prepositions, and nouns in each possible combination were analyzed. The paper also details an experiment in which the types of nouns under each of the twenty-two prepositions were coded by human subjects in terms of their semantic features. Finally, a computer program was also utilized to calculate the shared meaning of the different VERBs and NOUNs. The results showed that the nouns in [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of], though they might form clusters of meanings, may not behave in the same way with and without the presence of the verbs.

Corpora are resourceful tools for linguistic observation, as they can provide quick statistics about a word compared with manual analysis. However, in some circumstances where qualitative analysis is needed, the use of a quantitative method may not produce the required results. Based on the keyword love, four types of materials were used to show the plausibility and implausibility of using corpora. First, romantic English songs were used to illustrate the kind of input students received from these songs. Second, we compared the songs to students’ essays on general essay topics. Then, we contrasted the first two sets of data to a native speakers’ corpus. Lastly, we showed how the creativity element can be reproduced by students through extended use of metaphors “Love is X”. While the students may have been exposed to more colloquial uses of love in love songs, their general essays showed a more neutral use, with fewer occurrences of love. In comparing the different texts, this paper will show how a corpus-based approach can be complemented by a qualitative examination of texts. Regarding pedagogical implications, corpora are a good resource of authentic materials and should be encouraged in the classroom as a reference for recurring language patterns.

Language data are digitized for analyzing and computing patterns of linguistic form, meaning, and use shaped and reshaped in the interactions of the users in social–cultural contexts in homogeneous or heterogeneous language communities. In this chapter, the rationale and tenets of the corpus-driven paradigm are introduced. Then, three areas of studies of linguistic patterns and cognition based on digitized corpus data collected from different language communities are discussed so as to understand what kinds of corpus data are employed in language studies, how the corpus data manifest the recurrent patterns of linguistic form, meaning, and use in various social–cultural contexts, and how the linguistic patterns reveal the linguistic cognition of a language community. In the first study, the corpus-based linguistic findings in news media demonstrate the intricate patterns of language in the social–cultural discourse in Taiwan. In the second, the use of language and gesture in Taiwan Mandarin shows the cross-modal behaviors and cognition embodied in people’s perceptual and bodily experiences in recurrent individual and social–cultural practices. Finally, in the third study, the narrative data produced by typical and atypical children in Taiwan Mandarin sheds light on the developmental integration of social–emotional, cognitive, and linguistic abilities across the two groups of young language users.

The analysis in this paper was based on five Malay narratives of the “frog story”. In these narratives, the types of lexical arguments and their relations with information flow and topic continuity were analyzed. It was found that most narrators used one lexical argument in telling the frog story (e.g., sarang itu jatuh “the nest fell”). About 60% of the verbs in the narratives contained one lexical argument only. Some transitive verbs that usually require the presence of both lexical arguments were used with one lexical argument only when produced in speech (e.g., dia mencari ø di merata tempat “he searched (for) ø everywhere”). Objects were sometimes omitted, as their meanings could be predicted from previous context. Despite the omission of objects, transitive constructions still prevailed in the stories. The most frequently occurring lexical arguments were objects (O) (37%), followed by intransitive subjects (S) (29%) and transitive subjects (A) (27%). In addition, our results showed that new information in Malay was usually allocated to the core argument of the object and to locative expressions, indicating that most of the new information appeared at the end of a clause. On the other hand, topic continuity was held between the subjects in two continuous intonation units. This clear-cut division of discourse functions in the heads and tails of constructions was consistently found in the five pieces of narration. This observation not only showed how ideas could be continued in Malay oral narratives, but also contributes to the study of discourse structure in Malay.