A Cognitive Linguistics Approach To Polysemy

As an important and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, polysemy has attracted much attention of linguists working in various branches of linguistics. There are a lot of definitions of polysemy. This thesis holds that polysemy is a static representation of the dynamic process of category enrichment. That is, polysemy refers to the relation between different but related meanings of one single word.This thesis starts with a brief literature review on two approaches, formalistic and structuralistic, to the study of polysemy. Negligence of defining and explaining polysemy is the weak point of the formalistic research, while the structuralistic approach interprets polysemy without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanism. Therefore, these two approaches can not reveal the essence of polysemy and fail to give a satisfactory explanation of the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy.The development of cognitive linguistics helps us break through the fence of structuralism and formalism and explain the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy from the external world and from the perspective of the human subjective interaction with the objective world. This thesis, based on the two working principles of categorization in cognitive linguistics, makes a tentative study on polysemy in terms of internal structure of polysemy. Through these two principles, the theory of gestalt perception and the theory of family resemblance, the study of polysemous words is changed into the question of finding the possible relationship between the basic meanings and the extended meanings. These two working principles have also offered evidence to show that metaphor and metonymy are the most basic and important means in the process of meaning extension of polysemous words.To make the present study more convincing, an experiment is conducted among college students to show how metaphor and metonymy function in the process of meaning extension and whether providing metaphorical and metonymic motivations surely facilitates students learning and memorizing polysemous words well. The word hold is taken as an example in the case study to represent all polysemous words. Three aspects of hold, the meanings of the word hold, the phrasal verbs containing hold, the idioms involving hold, are analyzed to show how metaphorical and metonymic means function in the process of meaning extension. The result of this experiment undoubtedly and obviously presents that students who have learned how certain metaphorical and metonymic means structure the meanings of polysemous words have acquired the...