5 Pragmatics of flexibility in Classical Chinese: The level of argument structure constructions

Abstract

The previous chapter explored the most fundamental and basic patterns of semantic type shifts of flexible lexemes in terms of metonymy. This chapter shows how the metonymic relationships, as the cognitive-semantic foundation of the derivations of flexible lexemes, interact with a given argument structure construction (which carries its own meaning), and how these are further concretized into multiple pragmatic implicatures. For this purpose, the discussion will focus on the N→V type of derivation of object-denoting lexemes within either an intransitive or a transitive argument structure construction. The point of departure for this chapter is Bisang’s (2008a, 2008b) approach to the verbal function of object words in Late Archaic Chinese. As discussed previously (section 2.2.3.2), Bisang’s approach, by combining Goldberg’s (1995, 2005) Construction Grammar with stereotypical implicatures (Levinson 2000), shows that the verbal function of an object word in an intransitive or transitive argument structure construction can basically be derived through pragmatic implicatures that depend on the semantic class of objects to which the word concerned belongs and the meaning contributed by the whole construction. This chapter will discuss different semantic classes of object-denoting lexemes in Classical Chinese and show how their concrete meaning in the V-position of a given argument structure construction is derived through two mechanisms, rulebased and metaphorical ones. The first section 5.1 discusses the verbal function of object-denoting lexemes derived through the rule-based mechanism, termed as rule-based interpretation. The notion of rule-based interpretation concerns cases in which the verbal interpretation of an object word in an argument structure construction can be derived through pragmatic implicatures based on the grammatical analysis of that construction, i.e. based on the meaning of components of the construction (Bisang 2008a, 2008b). On the other hand, however, there are also cases where the verbal interpretation of given object words cannot simply be achieved in this way. In these cases, the interpretation of an object word in the V-position goes beyond the semantic and conceptual domain of that word (domain of its semantic class), so that a grammatical analysis of the construction does not suffice to derive the meaning of that construction. Rather, in order to get the specific meaning of the word concerned as well as the meaning of the whole argument structure construction, interpretation via metaphors (e.g., Lakoff 1987, 1993; Kovecses 2010) is needed. The question of how to derive the metaphorical interpretation of given object words in verbal function will be addressed in section 5.2. Section 5.3 discusses the relationship between the rule-based and metaphorically motivated interpretations that an object-denoting lexeme in verbal function may have. More specifically, this section addresses the question of where concepts of metaphor are located and integrated into the N→V derivation of object words. This chapter concludes with a brief summary and discussion presented in section 5.4.