EXPLAINING THE SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE VERB CHẠY (RUN) FROM COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The verb chạy (run) denotes one of the most fundamental and regular acts of
movement among animals in general, and human beings in particular. Over thousands of years in use, the meanings of the verb chạy have expanded tremendously. An indepth investigation of the meanings of the verb chạy and other verbs of motion from cognitive linguistic perspective promises to bring new understanding of the relation among cognition, culture, thought and language. The investigation of chạy’s meanings in this paper largely relies on Từ điển tiếng Việt (Dictionary of Vietnamese, 2015), and various occurences of the verb chạy in different texts from literary to media works. Traditional componential analysis is applied in the analysis of chạy’s meaning and its semantic development, along with basic concepts of Cognitive Linguistics such as construal, salience / prominence, foreground, background, experiental correlation and perceptual resemblance. The results show that during their development process, several semes of chạy’s meanings undergo certain shift, and even disappear, while new semes can emerge due to a multitude of factors in human cognition. Participants in the semantic structure of sentences with chạy assume a variety of theta-roles, and chạy’s meanings are also determined or governed by the attributes or properties of those participants as well.