Semantic distinction and representation of the Chinese ingestion verb chī

Abstract

Research on the Chinese high-frequency verb chī ‘eat’ is manifold with quite diverse observations by various analytical proposals. Representative works include the five-element semantic chain [1], the emergent argument structure hypothesis [2], and the MARVS-based semantic accounts [3–6]. However, little consensus has been reached on the polysemy of chī and its semantic-to-syntactic properties. In this paper, a comprehensive study of chī with in-depth lexical semantic analysis is conducted by adopting a corpus-driven, frame-based constructional approach. It proposes that chī can be viewed as having ‘one frame, three profiles and seven constructional meanings’ under the assumption that semantic distinctions can be made only if there are sufficient collo-constructional evidence. This study also demonstrates how the polysemy of chī can be understood by a two-dimensional analytical model to account for its semantic extensions based on the interaction of spatial and eventive readings.