On Cognitive Mechanisms And Motivations Of English Polysemy In The View Of Conceptual Metaphor And Metonymy

Looking into vocabulary from the historical view of words evolution, a word is only the monosemic one when it first appears. However, with the development of people's needs to understand and explain the world, the existing monosemic words can not satisfy people's needs of expression. Adding some new senses to the original word become the best economical way, so vocabulary gradually changes from monosemy to polysemy. The synchronic coexistence of an original meaning and the diachronic development of a new sense give the way to polysemy.The traditional linguists believe that the multiple senses of polysemy and the extension of the core meaning of polysemy are arbitrary. Thus, in teaching and learning the polysemous words, the learners are asked to try their best to remember the senses of the polysemous words one by one, or guess the multiple senses of polysemous words according to the context. In fact, some studies have been conducted by structural linguists to analyze polysemy, especially, they find out two processes of polysemization:radiation and concatenation. This point gives us a good suggestion to study polysemy. Because traditional linguists usually analyze language depending on language itself, they claim that polysemy is nothing but a linguistic coincidence. As a result, the traditional researches fail to reveal the essence of polysemy and make an unreasonable explanation to the motivation of polysemy.Whether is the relationship between the different senses of a polysemous word really arbitrary? With the development of cognitive science in recent years, cognitive linguistics has developed into a wholly new and mature field of linguistics. Cognitive linguists provide a more rational interpretation of polysemy from the external world to explain the motivation of the multiple senses of a polysemous word. Cognitive linguists assert that a word meaning is an open system which is gradually subject to change and evolution. Polysemy is the process of the extension of the core or basic meaning of a word under the influence of cognition. Since Lakoff & Johnson (1980) having published their masterpiece:Metaphor We Live By, we have had a new comprehension to metaphor and metonymy. conceptual metaphor differs from conceptual metonymy lying in:the former is based on the similarities of different conceptual domains in which the abstract concepts in the target domain is understood in terms of the concrete concepts in the source domain; while the latter was structured depending on the feature of contiguity among the mere conceptual domain. From the prospective of cognitive linguistics, we can study the motivation among polysemous words thoroughly.This thesis aims to investigate into the cognitive process of polysemy from the perspective of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and prototypical category theory. Through researching into prototype category theory, we find out that the multiple senses of polysemy belong to the same semantic category. Among this senses are from the core meaning by conceptual metaphor and metonymy. All the multiple senses obtain family resemblance. However, conceptual metaphor and metonymy are the most important theories to form the motivations of polysemy. On the basis of case study of polysemy, this thesis tries to solve the two questions:1. What are the cognitive motivations among the multiple senses of polysemy? 2. How do the cognitive motivations among the senses of polysemy function? This thesis mainly based on the established theories of cognitive linguistics constructs the theoretical framework of polysemy in order to analyze and explain this phenomenon and help the students to recognize polysemous words from a new prospective and acquire polysemous words easily. In addition, under the guidance of this theoretical frame of cognitive linguistics, we carry on a case study of several different representative polysemous words to explore the cognitive process of polysemy.Finally, we draw the conclusions:(1). the cognitive motivations of polysemous words are represents by the working mechanisms of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. (2). The relationship between multiple senses of Polysemy is the extension of the core or basic meaning by means of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and prototypical categorization theories, forming a meaning chain with the prototypical meaning standing in the center. Except the core or prototypical meaning, other multiple senses of a polysemous word are connected and arranged by family resemblance. These results further reinforce that the relationships between different senses of a polysemous word is well motivated rather than arbitrary. Through constructing the semantic network of polysemous words, we can help the students easily remember the senses of polysemous words in a long-term retention. Not only does this thesis rationally explain the motivations of the multiple senses of polysemy, but also it generate certain implications to teaching and learning polysemy, dictionary compiling, and textbook designing, etc.