The Semantic Extension of Tioh 著in Taiwanese Southern Min: An Interactive Approach

According to traditional lexicographical practice tioh8 著 as a polysemous word in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) is represented as having as many senses (or rather sememes) as there are synonymous expressions available as definientia. Such a practice inevitably results in producing unwieldy multiple senses especially of words such as da3 打 in Mandarin. In order to adequately capture the asymmetric relation between form and meaning a distinction is drawn between conceptual structures and surface syntactic forms. An account based on such a distinction as well as the mapping between them can then achieve a greater measure of economy and generality since it is usually the case that a common conceptual structure or frame can be established to integrate a range of surface syntactic constructions. The polysemous lexeme tioh8 著 is a case in point. In this paper we provide a unified account of the polysemy of tioh8 著based on frame semantics and basic assumptions of construction grammar (Fillmore et al. 1988, Fillmore and Atkins 1992, 1994 and Lien 2000).