從認知語意學觀點探討中文「婊」一字的語意變遷 = A Cognitive Semantic Perspective on the Semantic Change of 婊biǎo in Mandarin Chinese

This study focuses on the semantic change and development of the word婊biǎo, which is once used as an expletive, and then has developed a predicate usage in the modern era. We apply not only the model of Principled Polysemy (Evans 2005) to illustrate the semantic network of 婊biǎo, but the Invited Inferencing Theory (Traugott and Dasher 2002) for its semantic change as well as some possible cultural and social factors. In addition, we compare and contrast how the word is used (e.g., the semantic prosody, the distribution of syntactic categories) in two registers—PTT forum and newspapers, enables us to understand more about the influence of the subculture on the main culture. Through the analysis, we illustrate not only the relation between language and culture but how cognitive mechanisms function during semantic change. Moreover, we provide a complete description and semantic network for the word 婊biǎo, which complements the research gap of Chinese study on this word.