태국어 신체 어휘 의미의 은유적 확장 - “므” (‘손’) 의 다의성

Abstract

A body part term /mɯ:/ ('hand') in Thai is a polysemous word. Its prototypical meaning consists of three attributes: one is a configurational attribute granted by virtue of its position in a body (i.e., hands are located at the end of arms); the other is a compositional attribute granted by virtue of its structural elements (i.e., hands are composed of palms and fingers); another is a functional attribute granted by virtue of its function (i.e., hands are used to grab or hold something). This prototypical meaning becomes the basis for the various metaphorical meaning extensions for the word /mɯ:/. I found that the meanings of the term /mɯ:/ extends from animate to non-animate, from corporal to spatial, from concrete to abstract, and finally from content to functional. This shows that the meanings of the term /mɯ:/ does not extend beyond the scope of the categorical metaphor theory claimed in Heine et al. When the prototypical meaning extends to abstract meanings, it is found to be done via one of the two mechanisms at large: One is a conceptual metaphor, and the other is a conceptual metonymy. Through the analysis of data collected from the Thai National Corpus, I found that the meaning of the term /mɯ:/ extends its prototypical meaning to four different conceptual metaphors, i.e. COOPERATION/ RELATION IS HOLDING IN HANDS, POSSESSION IS GETTING SOMETHING IN HAND, CONTROL IS HOLDING SOMETHING IN HAND and HELP IS GIVING A HAND. I also found that the meaning of /mɯ:/ extends to three different conceptual metonymy, i.e. HAND STANDS FOR PERSON, HAND STANDS FOR ACTIVITY and HAND STANDS FOR SKILL. These abstract meanings of /mɯ:/ are found to be derived from its prototypical meanings, thus the result of my analysis supports the theory of embodiment and conceptualization of the cognitive linguists.