Metaphorical Transfer and Pragmatic Strengthening: On the Development of V-diao in Mandarin

In this synchronic study, I shall adopt a corpus-based approach to investigate the semantic change of V-diao in Mandarin. Semantically, V-diao constructions fall into three categories: A) Physical disappearance from its original position, with the V slot filled by physical verbs, such as tao-diao “escape,” diu-diao “throw away,” and so on. B) Disappearance from a certain conceptual domain, rather than from the physical space, with the V slot filled by less physically perceivable verbs, such as jie-diao “quit,” wang-diao “forget,” and the like. C) The third category of V-diao involves the speaker’s subjective, always negative, attitude toward the result. Examples include: lan-diao “rot,” ruan-diao “soften,” huang-diao “yellow,” and so forth. It is claimed in this paper that the polysemy between types A and B is motivated by metaphorical transfer [Sweetser, 1990; Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca, 1994; Heine, Claudi and Hunnemeyer, 1991]. Based roughly on Huang and Chang [1996], I demonstrate that a cognitive restriction on selection of the verb will cause further repetitive occurrence of negative verbs in the V slot. Finally, I shall claim that pragmatic strengthening [Hopper and Traugott, 1993; Bybee, 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at ROCLING XIV at National Chengkung University, Tainan, Taiwan. The author is especially grateful to Dr. Lily I-wen Su for her insightful comment on this paper. Without her valuable feedback, completion of this paper would have been impossible. I would also like to thank Dr. Shuanfan Huang, Dr. Wenyu Chiang, Dora Lu, Agnes Huang and two anonymous reviewers of ROCLING for their helpful suggestions. Any remaining errors are of course my own. * Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]