A Cognitive Study Of Polysemous Common Verbs In EFL Learning

Polysemy is a significant language phenomenon. It appears widely in every language and common everyday words are likely to be polysemous. Due to the fact that Polysemy has more than one different but related sense, it has always been a vexing issue for the understanding of language, and it has been a major bottleneck for language acquisition and language processing. Because polysemous words constitute a large part of vocabulary, finding ways to accelerate learners' access to the correct polysemous word meanings in context is helpful for their acquisition of polysemy. Thus not only will learners improve their comprehension of an utterance in which a polysemous word is embedded, but they will also be better at using the acquired polysemous senses in language production. In the past, researches on polysemy in the light of traditional view emphasized the linguistic system itself, ignored human's knowledge of the world acquired through his interaction or mental activity. Thus it could not give a full and rich explanation of polysemy. With the emergence of cognitive linguistics, polysemy is researched by means of human conceptual knowledge and cognitive devices, which then provide a framework to explain the phenomenon of polysemy. Concerning the researches on polysemy acquisition, though many researches have been conducted to investigate first language learners' processing and psychological realization of polysemous words, few research has touched the issue of how foreign language learners process polysemous words or how to facilitate their comprehension of polysemy in a foreign language. Because of the importance of polysemy in language acquisition and accurate reading, polysemy is an issue that foreign language researchers and learners have to face.Based on modern cognitive theories and former empirical studies, this thesis makes a tentative study on English polysemous common verbs. It focuses on Chinese English learners' comprehension of English polysemous common verbs in sentence processing by using the theory of family resemblance and frame semantics. According to the family resemblance theory, the senses of a polysemous word form a family resemblance category, in which other senses can extend from the basic or the core sense and they have close relationships with each other. And also the significance of context in that context plays an important role in determining and understanding the senses of polysemy. Thus by knowing the core senses of English polysemous common verbs and being provided with rich contextual information, it is assumed that participants in this study can extract effective information in the elaborated context and infer the tested unfamiliar senses of the polysemous verbs from the core sense. Frame Semantics theory holds that word senses are related to each other by way of their links to common background frames. Thus to understand the meanings of the words in a language, people should first have knowledge of the conceptual structures, i.e., semantic frames, which provide the background and motivation for their existence and uses in the languages. Based on this theory, it is assumed that by providing background frames of the target polysemous verbs and also the cueing verbs which share the same concept with the tested senses, participants can comprehend the unfamiliar senses of the polysemous verbs. Therefore, in this study, two different types of cues to help learners comprehend unfamiliar senses of polysemous common verbs are tested: A elaborated context with rich contextual information and B semantic frames with the concept of the target words.By using two types of cues, Cue A and Cue B, this study attempts to examine the effects of the two cues on participants' comprehension of unfamiliar senses of polysemous verbs and answer whether and to what extent does each type of cue aid learners' comprehension of unfamiliar senses. The data of the thesis is collected from questionnaire. 82 participants at Shandong University take part in this study. They are assigned randomly into two experimental groups and one control group. After the data is collected, it is analyzed by computer software SPSS.The results show that both types of cues are helpful. While semantic frames proves to be most powerful, revealing that students can disambiguate polysemous word senses by understanding underlying concepts of the tested words. Thus it seems to be a new and effective approach for learners to acquire polysemy. The elaborated context cue is also helpful, indicating contextual information as useful in resolving word sense ambiguity. The overall findings in this study suggest that learners need to emphasize equally guessing word meaning from context and knowing underlying conceptual network among related senses in order to acquire polysemy successfully in a foreign language. Though there are some limitations in this study which future researchers should overcome, this paper provides some implications for future study and also pedagogy on polysemy.