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Article published In: Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 6:1 (2015) ► pp.2–27

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On the principled polysemy of -kai in Chinese resultative verbs

 | The Pennsylvania State University
 | National Taiwan University
Published online: 10 September 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.6.1.01wan
The present study sets out to construct a semantic network for -kai in Chinese resultative verbs based on the framework of Principled Polysemy. Our analysis concerning the cognitive-pragmatic motivations for the meaning extensions of postverbal -kai pinpoints the significance of perspective-taking and real-world force dynamics in the conceptual structure of Chinese resultative verbs. With the aid of corpus data, we further demonstrate how pertinent textual cues help to disambiguate polysemous V-kai complex verbs and evoke metaphorical readings of the gestalt V–V constructions, hinting at the distributed and context-sensitive nature of the meaning construction of Chinese resultative verbs.
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