Abstract
According to traditional lexicographical practice tioh8著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 ploysemy of tiooh8著based on frame semantics and basic assumptions of construction grammar.