The Cognitive Study Of Polysemy Of Chinese "生,活 And 死"

Two hypotheses are proposed in this paper in which I will analyze Chinese two-word compounds of those three words:Hypothesis 1:The meaning extensions of BIRTH, LIFE and DEATH are the development from prototypical animate domain to peripheral inanimate domain, the meaning extensions are in the method of metaphor and metonymy.Hypothesis 2:The meaning extensions and their grammaticalization are all based on the human experience—experiential realism.The two hypotheses are verified by the usage of the two-word compounds and the sentences of the three words which come from dictionary (XINHUA) and corpus (Beijing University Modern Chinese Corpus) respectively. After the complete and analysis, the paper gives the reasonable and credible answer to the two hypotheses.The first chapter is the reason why I chose this issue as my research and the overall structure. In the second chapter, I will introduce some acknowledged conceptions of polysemy, such as the distinction of homonymy and polysemy, which is the foundation of polysemy research.The third chapter is the introduction of the Classical Category theory, which is the basis of semantic theories, and it leads to the most represented view of transformational polysemy—Katz's Componential theory which is very influential before cognitive linguistics. If the Classical category governs the traditional meaning theory, so the Modern category is to create the new meaning theory which is cognitive semantics. There are some distinctions between the classical and modern category, and I give the overview about the polysemy study in cognitive linguistics. After the necessary introduction, it is the method of meaning extension, metaphor and metonymy, in cognitive linguistic view, metaphor is the mapping from the source domain to the target domain, and metonymy is the mapping in one domain. In the fourth chapter, it is the methodology and the data used by the research. In linguistic study, many methods are derived from language intuition, many linguists use the sentence created by them as exemplification. Corpus can resolve this problem, in which the sentences or data are the collection of usual use.The fifth chapter is the most important part in this essay, which is the analysis of the data of the three words polysemy. The analysis begins with the different senses in dictionary which is fixed in use and then tries to find out the grounds between them. There are some illustrations of the relationship between the polysemy of the three words. in the last part, the paper discusses the reason why we always use死死的,活活的and生生的to express some absolute emotion in our daily life. In the sixth chapter, it is the conclusion and findings in this thesis.