Towards a dynamic behavioral profile of the Mandarin Chinese temperature termre: a diachronic semasiological approach

Abstract

This study adopts a corpus-based behavioral profile approach, combining multifactorial usage-feature analysis with frequency-based quantitative analysis, to investigate the diachronic semasiological variation of the Mandarin Chinese temperature term 热 re ‘hot’. The result shows a dynamic behavioral profile, i.e., both the usage patterns and the semasiological structural weight of senses have been constantly shifting. The semasiology of re has been becoming more and more diversified over time. Methodologically, this study extends the traditional behavioral profile approach—hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis by applying multiple correspondence analysis and corroborating its validity in accounting for and visualizing the multifactorial nature of semasiological change of lexical items. Theoretically, the present study not only corroborates basic assumptions of usage-based cognitive semantics (e.g., non-discreteness, non-equality of senses, and bodily experience) but also complements it by demonstrating that sociocultural factors also play an important role in semasiological boundary variation of a lexical item.

Event integration as a driving force of language change: evidence from Chinese 使-shǐ-make

“…In a usage-based model of semantics, we can operationalize the prototypicality of a lexical item’s senses as the relative frequency of each sense (cf. Liu, 2023; Soares Da Silva, 2012). In other words, relative frequency manifests the structural weight of a certain sense.…”

Does corpus size influence normalised frequencies?

“…These are typically reported as occurrences in one thousand or one million tokens by multiplying the quotient between raw frequency fraw and corpus size s (number of tokens) by the normalisation quantity c: 𝑓 ! "#$ = Newman 2024), semasiological approaches (Liu 2023), diachronic (Schneider 2023) or register variation studies (Kytö & Smitterberg 2023), only to name a few. A search with the terms "normali[s/z]ed/relative frequenc[y/ies]" in the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory alone results, at the time of writing, in hits for 93 separate articles.…”