Rujiwan Laophairoj
Research Institute for
Languages and Cultures of Asia,
A
Study of polysemic expressions of ăn ‘to eat’ in Vietnamese: Cognitive
Semantics
The objective
of this investigation is to study the polysemic expressions of the word ăn
‘to eat’ in Vietnamese based on the cognitive linguistics theory in order to
uncover the semantic relationships of the lexical item with other words. The
data were collected from various Vietnamese dictionaries and two Vietnamese
informants. The data exclude compound words and proverbs that contain the word
ăn. It is found that there are seven contextual meanings of the word. They
include (1) to eat or to bring food into the body, (2) to receive, (3) to use
up, (4) to occupy an area, (5) to merge, (6) to be a part of something, and (7)
to win or conquer. The first meaning is the word’s basic meaning, while the
rest are derived through the metaphorical process.