Abstract
This study will explore the contexts of the lexical semantic change of the word zǒu “走, to walk” through the concepts of metonymy and metaphor. By examining the documents from ancient times, middle times to early modern times, this study has found that zǒu “走, to walk” in ancient times meant “to escape”. During the Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties, the meaning became “to run”. In early modern times, the major meaning of “to walk” appeared. The semantics of the word zǒu “走, to walk” in ancient times, middle times, and early modern times has not changed much in basic concepts, following the general concept of “starting point → path → ending point”.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by National Taiwan Normal University’s Chinese Language and Technology Center. The center is funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE), as part of the Featured Areas Research Center Program, under the Higher Education Sprout Project.
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Hsu, TY., Hong, JF. (2021). Lexical Semantic Evolution of Polysemous Words in Ancient Chinese—Taking Zǒu as an Example. In: Liu, M., Kit, C., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12278. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_62
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_62
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