TY  - BOOK
AU  - Haiyan Liang
PY  - 2024
CY  - Oxford, United Kingdom
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 9781803742793
TI  - The Perception and Acquisition of Chinese Polysemy
DO  - 10.3726/b21068
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1360812
N2  - Polysemous lexical items have multiple senses associated with a single form, and these senses are interrelated. Polysemy is a universal and omnipresent phenomenon, providing a robust tool to convey creatively our ideas and thoughts. As a result, polysemy presents challenges for second language (L2) learners. Existing studies on the issue of polysemy in language acquisition often rely on researchers’ subjective understandings of the network of meanings around a lexical item or focus on English examples. Yet Chinese lexis exhibits greater polysemy than English and deserves its own examination. This book takes one Chinese polysemous item as an example to explore how native (L1) speakers and L2 learners perceive its multiple senses as well as how these senses are acquired by L2 learners. This book also investigates the predictive strengths of various factors that contribute to the acquisition pattern. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted to achieve these objectives, including methods from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.
KW  - polysemy, sense relatedness, multidimensional scaling, conceptual metaphor, prototype, Chinese as a second language, concreteness, construction, frequency, lexical network, intuitive knowledge, production task, teaching sequence
LA  - English
ER  -