A Frame-based Account of Lexical Polysemy in Taiwanese

This paper provides a frame-based account of lexical polysemy exhibited in four commonly used words, viz. koan2 趕, thau3 透, tau3 鬥and chio3 照, in Taiwanese. It aims at arguing that frame semantics can make up for the deficiency of traditional lexicographic works. Sense extension as a source of lexical polysemy is reflected in various syntactic realizations and it can be demonstrated in the case under discussion as a result of the operation of metaphor and metonymy. In this paper conceptual frames are set up to capture in an economic way the semantic relatedness within each polysemous word. In-depth analyses of these four words are made to motivate frame semantics for dealing with the problems of lexical polysemy in Taiwanese.