This study is a syntactic-semantic analysis of the English verb bring. A similar methodology was used to the one laid out in Fillmore & Atkins (2000) for the verb ‘crawl.’ The analysis in this paper includes the traditional intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive uses, as well as where bring occurs as a phrasal verb or in an idiomatic expression. Fifty-two different senses were identified in Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MiCASE) (Simpson et al. 2002), all associated with particular constructions. I was unable to identify a single overarching sense which all of the constructions could be connected back to, although the senses can be connected to each other by metaphorical extension. Thus, bring by itself has very little meaning until it is used in a specific construction. The context of the constructions that polysemous words occur in will determine their semantics.
Publisher
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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