Meaning Prototype: A Study of '110 in Chinese

Abstract

The prototype view of word meaning is widely held in cognitive linguistics. However, it is generally a fixed and static view. This paper attempts to propose a dynamic prototype view of meaning and explicates it through a corpus analysis of '110' in China. It tentatively argues that meaning prototype is dynamic, functional, and developmental in nature, conceptually accommodating the different syntactic and semantic values of a word with ease, its dynamic relying heavily on central knowledge, which moves and develops through metonymy and metaphor in the use of a word. Meaning prototype develops in the uses of the word, and meaning develops in accordance with meaning prototype. In a different period or scenario, a different meaning prototype is likely to attain the forefront as the figure, and the previous meaning prototype fades to become the ground, although it may sometimes be ushered back to the figure position in a particular scenario.

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“…The popular view posits only a single prototype in a word, which links the polysemous senses and forms a radiation network (Gilquin 2008). Contrary to it, Fu (2015), Geeraerts (1993Geeraerts ( , 1997 and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2007) assume that the individual sense of a word can have a prototype. This can be exemplified by Ambridge (2020)'s example: spoons are generally small and metal or large and wooden; but there can not be a prototype that is intermediate in these attributes.…”