Comparison of beat and hit from the Perspective of Cognitive Semantics = Comparison of beat and hit from the Perspective of Cognitive Semantics

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Choi, Youngju. 2012, Comparison of beat and from the Perspective of Cognitive Semantics, The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 20(3), 17-37, This study compares the partially synonymous verbs beat and hit based on corpus data and shows, from the perspective of cognitive semantics, how they build up their own paths by focusing on different aspects of the prototypical senses. Beat and hit are both related to strike. However, when they extend their meanings, their foci diverge. The former pays more attention to repeatedness and forcefulness and the latter to one-time occurrence and accuracy of the striking behavior, resulting in very different meanings especially when they occur in abstract domains. The finding demonstrates that the major devices of cognitive semantics, metaphor and metonymy, can effectively explain how synonymous words develop their polysemous meanings along bifurcating paths.