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Article published In: Bringing Figurative Language into Real L2 Classrooms: The challenges of empirical testing
Edited by Ana M. Piquer-Píriz and Reyes Llopis-García
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 22:2] 2024
► pp. 476–504

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Regular article

The polysemy of the Japanese temperature adjective atsui

A behavioral profile analysis

 | Kyoto University
 | Kyoto University
 | Kyoto University
Published online: 23 June 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00156.wan
Abstract
This study adopts a corpus-based behavioral profile approach to explore the semantic relationships among the senses of the Japanese temperature adjective atsui (‘hot’). As a result, the hierarchical cluster analysis represents the distributional (dis)similarity of the ten senses of atsui. Average silhouette width suggests a two-cluster interpretation, which reveals that senses derived from the same experience (sensory or subjective) tend to have similar usage characteristics. The discriminating properties of four subclusters and usage characteristics of each sense have been identified by means of computing t-values. Also, the structure of the hypothesized network has been represented based on the distributional (dis)similarity of the ten senses. The relationships among these ten senses and the usage characteristics identified in this study provide insight into Japanese lexicography. Moreover, as the first attempt to apply the behavioral profile to the investigation of Japanese polysemy, this study holds implications for lexical semantics in Japanese.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Previous studies on atsui
    • 2.2Polysemy in cognitive linguistics
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The target lexical item and its senses
    • 3.2The behavioral profile approach
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Identifying the prototype of atsui
    • 4.2Semantic relations of atsui
      • 4.2.1General observations
      • 4.2.2Discriminating characteristics between clusters
      • 4.2.3Semantic relationships between individual senses
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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