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Abstract
This study analyzes the manual action verb dǎ as part of the [dǎ – NP] construction in two Chinese corpora. Drawing on constructionist perspectives on language productivity (Goldberg 2006; Gries 2012), I show that [dǎ – NP] is a productive construction the multiple meanings of which are conceptually motivated by manual action. The type-token distributions show the productivity of the [dǎ – NP] schema, and the semantic clusters in a network of meanings show a gradation of manual action experiences with no clear-cut conceptual boundaries. Usage productivity goes hand in hand with semantic extension, which gives rise to the emergence of the light verb dǎ. Contra previous morpheme-based studies that view dǎ as a polysemy in its own right, isolated from its network of collocates, I argue that polysemy is a consequence and an epiphenomenon of constructional productivity resulting from language use and exemplar propagation.
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