Abstract
Polysemy is a group of related and distinct senses (Sweester, 1986). Since polysemy lacks of coherent theoretical structure and ways to decide distinct senses, previous studies have different point of views about Chinese verb “zou”, from 2, 6, or 8, even up to 10 senses. The main goal of this thesis is to explore the theory of linguistic categorization and ways to decide distinct sense via the analysis of polysemous verb “zou” in modern Chinese, examples of which are drawn from the Academic Sinica Corpus and Udn News Data Corpus. Using Principled Polysemy (Evans, 2005) as a main framework and Sense Boundary as a reference (Croft and Cruse, 2004), 13 distinct senses of “zou” are identified, including one sub-sense. The research follows Ideal Cognitive Model (Lakoff, 1987) to analyze the relatedness within the senses of “zou”, suggesting different distinct senses from the metonymic and metaphorical mappings of the main sense (or sanctioning sense) of “zou”. According to Path Schema and Container Schema (Johnson, 1987), 13 types of image schema are identified which show the existence of cognitive concept within the distinct senses of “zou”. Finally, based on the result of the study, a semantic network of polysemous verb “zou” in modern Chinese is constructed.