A Cognitive Study Of The Mechanisms Of Semantic Extension And Its Implications For English Lexicography

Metaphor and metonymy are proved powerful mechanisms of semantic extensions by the study within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, but the study has so far been confined to case studies and lexical polysemy and there is even less study on polysemous animal lexemes. Since much human behavior can be metaphorically or metonymically understood through animal behavior, it is highly necessary to start with animal lexemes to explore the mechanisms of semantic extension. On the other hand, polysemy is also important but thorny to lexicography, and linguistic study and lexicography are complementary to each other.The study is based on the categorization theory, the theory of metaphor and metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics and grammatical metaphor in functional grammar; it studies all the animal lexemes collected from Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002); The Oxford English Dictionary and British National Corpus are utilized in the study and the result of the study can be applied into the practical lexicography. Through the study, the author has found: (1) Senses of the polysemous animal lexemes are extended through conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and grammatical metonymy; (2) The current typology of metonymy-producing relationships and metonymies (Radden & Kovecses, 1999) is not exhaustive, there are other types of metonymy; (3) Not only the frequently-used lexical items, but also those highly-featured have a variety of interrelated senses; (4) Cognitive linguistic theories have some implications for English lexicography.The author has built up a theoretical framework within the realm of Cognitive Linguistics and a systematic and exhaustive analysis of the collected data has been made to prove the validity of the theory. The result of the study has shed light on the practical lexicography, as for how to recognize, assign and arrange senses.