On Studying English Polysemy Within The Framework Of Cognitive Linguistics

Polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon, which has been a hot object in linguistics for many years. During the long history, people tried to explain the polysemy from different perspectives. But their studies were confined to lexics. Additionally people's study on the polysemy is in endless dispute without systemic summarization.The study on English meaning can be divided into three stages: the stage of scholium, the stage of traditional semantics and modern semantics. During every period people applied their favorite theories on the polysemy. Cognitive linguistics which was formed in 1980s provides people a chance of comprehending the nature of the polysemy. By being integrated with knowledge of linguistics, psychology, philosophy and logics, cognitive linguistics can explain many linguistic phenomena. This discipline also finds answers for many linguistic problems including the polysemy.The word "head" may have only one meaning when it appears: "one part of human body containing the eyes, nose, mouth and brain". With the development of human cognition, it has the extended meaning of "person in charge" by means of metaphor, and "the mind and mental ability" through metonymy. Nowadays we can use the word to means tens of meanings, such as "front position, the front or the most important position", "the place where a river, valley etc begins" which is the result of cognitive model metaphor. The word can be used to express "headache", "the distance of one head" and so on which are extended meanings by metonymy. Some phrases like "from head to toe", "hold one's head up/high", "over somebody's head" and so forth came into being in terms of image schema. The facts show that the polysemy came into being by metaphor, metonymy, image schema and other cognitive models.In a word, cognitive linguistics discovers the source of the polysemy and makes the research on the polysemy wider, deeper and closer to the nature. This research also gives us some inspiration in improvement and reformations in language teaching and learning.