A Cognitive Analysis Of Polysemous English Body Nouns

Polysemy refers to the phenomenon that a word has several related senses. It is common in different languages and belongs to the field of semantics. Although polysemy rarely causes problems in communication, it is an intractable issue in semantic research. How does a polysemous word extend its sense? What is the relationship between its sense items? Problems like these have received much attention in linguistics.Traditional linguists (mainly structuralists) analyze polysemes in terms of semantic features and semantic field. They tend to focus on the distinction between different senses of a polyseme and their studies are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanisms, thus can not reveal the nature of polysemy. On the philosophic basis of experientialism, cognitive linguists try to look into the motivation of polysemization and have offered a more thorough and systematic way to the analysis of polysemy.This thesis conducts a case study of four representative polysemous body nouns (head, heart, face and eye) from a cognitive perspective within the theoretical framework of categorization, metaphor and metonymy, the goal of which is to find out the sense structure, semantic extension mechanism as well as the features of polysemization. Cognitive linguists, like Lakoff, Johnson, and Taylor, claim that a word sense is an open system which is subject to change and evolution. Polysemization is the process of a word's core or basic sense extending to other related senses as a result of human cognitive categorization and conceptualization. Based on the prototype theory in categorization, this thesis regards the senses of a polyseme as a category in which distinct senses distribute around a central or prototypical sense by means of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Conceptual metaphor and metonymy differ from the traditional figures of speech. In the cognitive view, they are two powerful cognitive instruments for our conceptualization of abstract categories and can be regarded as two mapping processes. The difference between metaphor and metonymy lies in:metaphor is based on resemblance and it maps the logic of the source domain onto the target domain. There are two conceptual domains involved and one is understood in terms of the other. Metonymy is based on contiguity, which involves only one conceptual domain. One thing can have many attributes, and some of them are more prominent than others. People would like to use the prominent attribute to refer to this thing. Metaphorical and metonymic sense extensions have their respective features. The features of metaphorical sense extension mainly lie in the analogy in thinking, the directional and partial in mapping, the contradiction and fixity in semantics, and the reusability in linguistic form. As for the metonymic sense extension, highlighting can be regarded as its most outstanding feature-highlighting different aspects of an entity's constitution, highlighting a component of a unitary conceptual structure and highlighting an implication. Moreover, metaphorical and metonymic sense extensions have their respective mapping models. According to the comparative relationship between the source domain and the target domain, this thesis concludes the mapping models of metaphorical sense extension of English body nouns into three aspects:mapping from body domain to non-body domain, mapping from non-body domain to body domain and mapping between two body parts. Based on a detained analysis of the data collected, this thesis also concludes the mapping models of metonymic sense extension of English body nouns into three aspects:body part for the whole, body part for its function and body part for its other attributes. In the end, this thesis further studies the guidable significance of the prototype theory and the practical significance of conceptual metaphor theory for English teaching and learning.