Abstract
Chinese radicals are the semantic components of Chinese characters that generally indicate major concepts and categories. Characters that share the same radical may be semantically linked in various ways to the broad semantic category that the radical represents, and radicals may thus be considered a categorization mechanism to distinguish lexical meanings. Given the fact that FIRE is an independent character that can also be used as a radical in composite characters, the question arises as to what extent the semantic developments of the FIRE character and the FIRE radical are similar, i.e. does the FIRE radical develop independently of the FIRE character? Against the background of this question, this paper studies the diachronic semantic structure of the FIRE character, which will be compared to the FIRE radical in composite characters in follow-up studies. The analysis shows that the overall diachronic development of the FIRE character exhibits prototypical characteristics and a radial network structure.
About the authors
Danqing Huang (b. 1990) is a PhD student at the University of Leuven. Her research interests lie in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, with a specific focus on language variation and change. Her publications include “Visualization of diachronic change of English irregular verbs: A corpus-based study” (2016), “A multivariate analysis of the collostruction of English intensifiers: A case study” (2017), and A corpus-based study on the sociolinguistic variation of past-tense forms of English irregular verbs (2017).
Dirk Geeraerts (b. 1955) is professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven. His research interests include lexical semantics and lexicology in a cognitive linguistic framework, with a specific focus on semantic variation and change. His publications include Diachronic prototype semantics (1997), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics (2007), Theories of lexical semantics (2010), and Ten lectures on cognitive sociolinguistics (2018).
Weiwei Zhang (b. 1983) is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven. Her research interests lie in the fields of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics in general, with a specific focus on metaphor/metonymy, construction grammar, language change/variation, and lectometry. Her publications include “Visualizing onomasiological change” (2015), “Cross-linguistic variation in metonymies for PERSON” (2015), Variation in metonymy (2016), and “(Non)metonymic expressions for GOVERNMENT in Chinese” (2018).
Funding: This research was supported with a grant from the China Scholarship Council–CSC (File No. 201708330249).
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