Analysis of Polysemy and Its Applications to Corpus Documentation: A Study Based on Saisiyat
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Huang, Shuping
Abstract
Being an important issue, polysemy has received a great much attention from different fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. In everyday conversation, language users typically generate appropriate interpretation of a polyseme with no difficulty (Taylor) — Polysemy is found to cause problems mainly in cross-linguistic contexts (Riemer 2001). We are thus motivated to investigate polysemy in a cross-linguistic context. Based on our experience of working on the creation and maintenance of the NTU Corpus of Formosan languages, we aim to explore documentation of polysemes by case studies on Saisiyat polysemy, using Mandarin as a meta-language.n the course of language fieldwork, there is no known method of determining precisely the meaning of a lexical item. Two factors are directly responsible: contextual modulation and mismatches of semantic partitioning. The meaning of a lexical item is modulated in situated contexts, and new meaning emerge almost whenever a lexical item is used in a novel context. In addition, semantic partitioning is also a major source of misunderstanding. For concepts that are conceived as relevant in Saisiyat, their relations may not be highlighted in Mandarin and are thus expressed with formally irrelevant linguistic forms. When one Saisiyat lexical item yields multiple Mandarin translations, we need careful collation to determine which translation reflects the core meaning of the delimited lexical item. ur analysis of three Saisiyat lexical items reveals that meta-language translation has a direct impact on our interpretation of the linguistic data. For example, Saisiyat nanaw denotes limitation of a quantity, like English ‘only,’ and it is also used to express an affirmative attitude to the factual status of a statement, like English ‘exactly.’ These two meanings are related, but such extension is found to be typologically-unimportant ones manifested in few languages, and its meta-language translations are seemingly irrelevant, which can yield a homonymy reading. Another lexical item nahaen is used to denote repetition, succession, and precedence of activities. Similar semantic network are more likely to be found in other languages, and many of its Mandarin translations exhibit functional overlaps, which may help corpus users to discover the relations between instances of nahaen. We may also come across cases of very high degree of cross-linguistic predictability, yielding similar ways of conceptual categorization in genetically-unrelated languages, as well as relatively consistent direct translation. Our study of Saisiyat ma'' ‘also’ is one of the examples. heoretically, language-specificity of semantic partitioning urges us to take a social-cultural view on perspectivization. It is commonly held that the development of a network exhibits tendency of “subjectification”— the speaker tends to include his own epistemic attitude and personal evaluation when using an expression (Langacker 1990). Traugott (2003) further postulates that speaker’s point of view has to align with that of his addressee, a tendency known as “intersubjectification.” The intersubjectification view is supported by our study, but we claim that the speaker’s construal of a scene for the purpose of verbalization has to take into the shared linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge of the entire speech community. A “collective” view of intersubjectification is postulated to account for language-specificity. mpirically, we propose that a consistent gloss of a polyseme can be sought on the basis of its prototype. We agree that inconsistent and imprecise translation of a lexical item in different contexts is inevitable in linguistic fieldwork. A polyseme is nevertheless advisable to be glossed consistent by one meta-language gloss (Lehmann 1982). Consistent glossing yields five advantages: 1) reflecting fundamental division between semantics and pragmatics, 2) facilitating user’s identification of a linguistic item, 3) exhibiting economy and precision of data presentation, 4) facilitating search of a lexical item in a corpus, and 5) preserving conceptual categorization of the target language. Based on the categorization view of polysemy, we propose that the meta-language gloss of a polyseme should reflect the prototype of the polyseme. When a researcher wishes to gloss a polyseme by a consistent cover term, he can exploit the notion of prototype. verall, our investigation integrates intra-language investigation of polysemy with inter-language comparison of semantic partitioning. In addition to examination of theoretical issues, we tackle empirical problems of semantic analysis in language fieldwork with special focus on the possible applications to language documentation.
Subjects
polysemy
comparative linguistics
categorization
prototype
language documentation
perspectivization
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