An Analysis Of The Cognitive Motivation Of Polysemy

Polysemy is a very common phenomenon in almost all languages. It belongs to the field of Semantics, while the study of polysemy has a long history in the philosophy of language and in literature. Generally speaking, a word having two or more meanings is polysemous. How an individual word changing or extending its meanings? Linguists hold different views and attempt to approach the problems from different perspectives.Semantic Componential Analysis divides a word's meaning into several semantic features. Failure to defining and explaining polysemy is the weak point of this approach. The structural approach, although providing an invaluable tool in explaining the semantic change and polysemy, interprets polysemy without mentioning its underlying mechanism. Cognitive linguists, like Lakoff,Johnson, and Taylor, offer a more thorough and systematic way to the analysis of polysemy. They assert that a word meaning is an open system which is subject to change and evolution. Polysemy is regarded as a result of human cognition.This thesis aims at analyzing the cognitive motivation of polysemy and finding the relations between the various meanings of a polyseme. On the theoretical basis of Prototype Models of Categorization and Idealized Cognitive Models, the thesis put forward the idea that various meanings of a polyseme are extended from the original by the three main cognitive tools, that is, image schema, metonymy and metaphor. Image schema is our shared experience; it can be metonymically and metaphorically extended to give rise to new meanings of a word. Moreover, most metaphors are based on metonymies.