earticle

영어

This research aims to explore individual meanings as well as polysemic aspects of three body terms with French as « oreille, yeux, nez » using a corpus-based analysis and to examine how their meaning extension is realized. ‘Body terms’ has received particular attention to the field of cognitive semantics and there has been much related research (domestic and foreign) combined with diverse terms of various languages. However, relatively little attention has been paid to French body terms and especially, few studies have dealt with them using corpus-based analysis. Three terms « oreille, yeux, nez », means « ear, eye, nos » respectively, are related with each other for a spatial proximity as well as a characteristic of ‘information’s input organ’, which could affect their meaning extension. Our findings through this study showed that firstly, three terms’ prototypical meanings as well as their extended meanings could be categorized. Secondly, the frequency of use of these three terms could be extracted based on the same corpus and their collocated constructions. Thirdly, how their meaning extension is realized could be represented and verified in terms of HUMAN > ANIMAL > OBJECT > ABSTRACT in the light of meaning extensions’ direction.