| Abstract: | 本計畫將分三年，逐年從以下所述之三個層面比較馬來語和英語介系詞概念 (prepositional concept) 之異同。(一) 從詞彙層面研究介系詞不同意義之隱喻連結；(二) 從結構層面探討介系詞這個概念與其搭配詞組，包括主體名詞、背景名詞及其對應之動詞；(三) 從語意層面分析主體名詞、背景名詞與前列動詞之語意特徵。本計畫主要研究問題如下： (1) 介系詞概念在馬來語與英語中之異同？ (2) 在詞彙與結構層面上，此兩種語言中的介系詞概念有何異同？ (3) 介系詞概念中之語意延伸模式在此二語言中有何相異處？ (4) 介系詞概念之搭配詞有哪些語意特徵？而這些語意特徵在此二語言中又有何相同或相異之處? 本研究之重要性如以下所述：(一) 過去有研究解釋單一或一小組之介系詞，但尚未有研究系統性地比較兩種語言之介系詞概念； (二)英語與馬來語均為SVO 語言，且皆有介系詞此語類，介系詞在此二語言的空間、時間概念上之異同、及其於此二語言呈現之模式皆值得作分析；(三)尚未有研究採混合式分析法，從詞彙、結構及語意等層面分析語料；(四) 過去相關研究均偏重介系詞於印度尼西亞馬來語中的使用情形，但馬來西亞標準馬來語中的介系詞研究仍十分欠缺。且目前未有適用本研究計畫之馬來語語料庫，故本計畫將擴大並標記已自行建置約一百萬字之馬來語語料庫；(五)本研究除了可對語料庫語言學有所助益，亦將對介系詞語言類型研究 (typology) 有諸多貢獻。
This project intends to compare prepositional concepts (IN, UNDER, BETWEEN, etc.) in Malay and English from three aspects, focusing on one aspect per year, elaborated respectively as follows. First, at the lexical level, the metaphorical links of one sense of a preposition to another will be investigated; Second, at the constructional level, prepositional concepts and their collocations, including the figure nouns, ground nouns, and their corresponding verbs, will be investigated; and third, at the semantic level, the semantic features of these figure nouns, ground nouns, and the preceding verbs, will be coded and analyzed. All the above three aspects will be inspected based on the two compared languages, both of which show the existence of a preposition category, albeit there is a slight difference in their definition of ‘preposition.’ A three-year project is proposed with the following four main research questions: (a) How are the occurrences of prepositional concepts similar or different in Malay and in English corpora? (b) How are prepositional concepts in the two languages similar or different when they appear at lexical and constructional levels? (c) How will the patterns of semantic extensions within a prepositional concept differ between the two languages? (d) What might be the semantic features of the collocates preceding and following the prepositional concepts? What are the similarities and differences of semantic features between the two languages? Large-scale, corpus-based quantitative analysis will be employed to compare the similarities and differences among the prepositional concepts. The study is significant because of the following reasons: (a) No studies previously have used systematic criteria to compare these two languages in terms of their prepositional concepts. Many studies have attempted to explain individual or a small set of prepositions, but usually within a language; (b) Since both English and Malay display an SVO language pattern with a linguistic category of preposition, it is worth comparing the two languages with regard to their differences of spatial and temporal concepts, and how these concepts pattern in the two languages; (c) No previous studies have incorporated a hybrid analysis comprising a lexico-semantic treatment of data at lexical, constructional, and semantic levels, involving an analysis of the prepositional concepts and their surrounding collocates; (d) Most previous research on the Malay prepositions focuses on Indonesian Malay. No extensive coverage of Standard Malaysian Malay is available. Furthermore, since no existing Malay corpus is available for the purpose of this work, a self-built, one-million words Malay corpus will be made use to its maximum in this present study; and (e) Since also most corpus linguistic studies have now shifted to phraseological or pattern analyses, the outcomes of this project can contribute to typological research on prepositions, and at the same time, be applied to corpus linguistics theories. All the above reasons will make this project a significant one. |
