The Story of Shang 'Above': A Usage-based Approach to the Diachronic Development of Chinese Spatial Word

Abstract

The aim of this study is understand how a spatial word shang 'above' developed throughout the history of written Chinese to lead to its multiple related senses or polysemous usages nowadays. We investigate the diachronic developments of 2749 instances of spatial word shang 'above' in historical texts of Archaic Chinese (AC, 12th c B.C.- A.D. 220), Medieval Chinese (MC, A. D. 220-1368 c.), Modern Chinese (MOC, 15th - mid 19th c.) and Contemporary Chinese (CC, mid-19th-20th c.) from Chinese corpora. We apply both cognitive and constructional approaches in a usage-based model to the analysis of shang. Using corpora to trace the diachronic developments based on instances of shang in different historical periods, we show how various meanings and grammatical functions of shang emerged and developed in systematic ways. It is found that conceptual metaphors and invited inferences all take part in the various usages of shang: metaphors can lead to the occurrence of a new meaning of shangin an early stage by mapping an abstract semantic domain to a concrete domain; invited inferences allow speakers to assign an innovative meaning to shangand inferences tend to motivate the more subjective or grammatical meanings of shang. In addition, we found that other contextual factors, including constructional meanings, the frequency of use, and collocation types, etc. can motivate the semantic shift and lead to the conventionalization of a novel usage of shang. We also demonstrate that constructions containing shang are related and form a network and as the various constructions containing shang develop, the spatial word shang is sanctioned by more schemas, such as verb, postposition and verb complements. Finally, this study also reveals the lexical sources and evolutionary paths that are associated with shang. Our study fills a research gap by focusing on the earlier usages of the spatial word shang and it illustrates that synchronic semantic relations are the outcomes of long-term diachronic developments. This study displays how spatial concepts are coded linguistically by Chinese speakers and it identifies the driving factors that lead to the semantic changes and grammaticalization of spatial words at different historical periods. It is thus a contribution to the history of Chinese, usage-based language studies, studies on spatial language, and to grammaticalization studies.