Abstract
This study aims to investigate the lexical semantics of the verb fang4 in Mandarin Chinese. Though it is well-acknowledged that fang4 is polysemous, there is a lack of consensus about how many senses fang4 has. On the basis of five Chinese dictionaries and the study of Huang and Chen (2005), the amount of its sense ranges from seven to sixteen. With the theories of Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics, this study finds that as an action verb, fang4 has two senses. The primary sense is “to put” and the extended sense is “to release.” From the perspective of principled polysemy (Evans and Tyler 2004a), the meaning extension of fang4 is motivated by the conventionalization of inference related to life experience. Concerning the discourse prominence of arguments, this study indicates that speaker put much discourse prominence to the argument of location when using the primary sense. However, in view of the extended sense, what they emphasize will be the importance of the source argument, implying a purpose of releasing themes from source containers. Comparing the nuances with other verbs carrying similar lexical meaning in Chinese (i.e., the meaning of putting) such as pai2, dui1, and ge1 by MARVS (Chang et al. 2000), this study proposes that fang4 is the most unmarked and generalized verb among them. Besides, by analyzing the degrees of lexicalization of [fang4+N] ([VN]) construction, this study propounds that there are five lexical types of [VN]: phrases, separable words, compounds, idiomatic combinations, and idiomatic phrases. The findings of this study have implications for the pedagogical grammar of Chinese as a second language. According to Teng (1997-2009), the primary sense of fang4 should be learned before the extended sense. After surveying the present teaching materials, this study points out that some contents need to be adjusted and offers suggestions to teachers and designers of teaching materials.