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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 18:1 (2020) ► pp.213–243

Pò (‘break’), qiē (‘cut’) and kāi (‘open’) in Chinese

A diachronic conceptual variational approach

| University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
| Beihang University
| Beihang University

This study explores the conceptual boundaries among break, cut and open from an under-investigated diachronic perspective and addresses the diachronic conceptual variations of Chinese pò (‘break’), qiē (‘cut’) and kāi (‘open’). The Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus is employed for the extraction of historical data. Correspondence analyses are conducted for uncovering the conceptual boundary variations among pò, qiē, and kāi. In doing so, this study, situated in Diachronic Prototype Semantics, has revealed that: (1) The conceptual ranges of pò, qiē and kāi greatly overlapped in ancient Chinese, but their division of labor becomes increasingly clear-cut in Mandarin. (2) By the stage of Modern Mandarin, these three lexical categories have formed their own prototypical structures and categorize separation events of state change in virtue of a lexical continuum “kāi-pò-qiē”. (3) Language selection, semantic specialization, as well as conceptual reorganization are proposed as contributing factors for these changes.

Keywords: conceptual boundaries, diachronic perspective, Diachronic Prototype Semantics, separation events of state change, lexical continuum
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.From prototype theory to diachronic conceptual variation
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data source and chronological stages
    • 3.2Data retrieval and data annotation
      • 3.2.1Data retrieval
      • 3.2.2Data annotation
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Conceptual boundary shifting
    • 4.2Conceptual boundary variation
      • 4.2.1Boundary variations among pò, qiē and kāi
      • 4.2.2Categorization relationship among pò, qiē and kāi
    • 4.3Contributing factors to boundary variations
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 17 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00057.du
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