空间维度形容词“WIDE/NARROW”的词汇类型学研究

An Analysis of ‘WIDE/NARROW’ from the Perspective of Lexical Semantic Typology

Drawing on the theoretical framework of the Moscow Lexical Typology Group (MLexT), this paper analyzes the extended meanings of the spatial dimensional adjectives “WIDE/NARROW” in 13 languages and verifies cognitive commonalities and differences across regions and languages. The research indicates that the extended meanings of “WIDE/NARROW” take “horizontal distance on a two-dimensional plane” and “area of a bounded plane” as two typical starting points of their basic meanings. This demonstrates that there is a close relationship between the basic and extended meanings of words. Among the 13 languages investigated, Asian and European languages show similar paths in the extension from the spatial domain to the mental domain, and from the spatial domain to the cognitive domain in the extended meanings of “WIDE/NARROW”. However, there is a significant variation in how different languages extend “NARROW” from the spatial domain to the quantity domain, reflecting that the same extension pathway may lead to different specific outcomes in different languages.

本文以莫斯科词汇类型学研究小组（MLexT）的理论为指导，分析了13种语言“WIDE/NARROW”的引申义用法，并验证了跨地域、跨语言间的认知共性和差异，归纳总结了各语言引申发展的规律。研究表明，“WIDE/NARROW”引申义采用“二维平面的横向距离”和“有边界的平面的面积”这两个典型的基础义作为起点。这证明了词语的基础义和引申义之间具有密切的联系。在被调查的13种语言中，亚洲语言和欧洲语言“WIDE/NARROW”引申义在空间域向心智域、空间域向认知域的引申中都具有相似的路径。而各语言“NARROW”从空间域向数量域的引申存在较大差异，体现出同一引申途径，不同语言引申出的具体结果可能不尽相同。