A Cognitive Approach To Human Body Words

Human body words are widely and frequently used, and they play an important role in our life. Adopting a cognitive approach, we choose human body words as the study object and center on three aspects: the status of human body words in language and cognition, the relationship between senses of a human body word, and meaning construction of human body words. The thesis is a qualitative and quantitative analysis that explores and reveales the above aspects of human body words. It is hoped that the study will help us to get a better understanding of human body words. It is also hoped that such an effort will be of help to us in understanding polysemic category and meaning construction of other words.In the first chapter, we specify the study object of the thesis, and reveal the importance of human body words in language and cognition. Human body words are the stable kernel part of the basic vocabulary in English. They are not only powerful in word-formation, but also abundant in idiomatic expressions. Their status in language and cognition is above suspicion.Polysemy is an important characteristic of human body words. In the second chapter, we apply prototype theory to the study of polysemy of human body words. Senses of a human body word constitute a semantic network and distribute around a primary nuclear sense, which denotes a certain body part or human organ, and it is the prototype of the semantic category. The many distinct senses gather in the category regularly through two means of connection: radiation and chaining. The family resemblances of the category are the similarities with the body part in form, position, function, etc. Metonymy and metaphor are the most important motivations of polysemy of human body words.The rest two chapters deal with the meaning construction of human body words. Employing the mapping theory and encyclopedic knowledge, we propose a cognitive model for metonymic senses of human bodywords: metonymic senses of human body words are constructed through mappings within the domain matrix of HUMAN BEING The source domain is the body part. The target domain may be a person, an attribute of the body part, or a mental element of a person.Metaphoric senses of human body words are constructed through mappings from the domain of HUMAN BEING to other domains. Bases of the mappings are similarities or Human Body schema. In mappings based on similarities, what are really mapped are one or more attributes of a body part. In mappings based on Human Body schema, we do not only map slots in the human body domain onto slots in the target, but also the structures, relations, properties, and knowledge of a human body onto the target.