A Cognitive Construal Approach To Polysemous Networks

Polysemy, a phenomenon pervasive in all human languages, is an association of two or more senses sharing one single linguistic form, all of which originates in one core sense. With the derivation and expansion of the senses, one lexical item may acquire numerous senses, forming a semantic network. It is the most economical way to satisfy the ever-increasing demands on languages posed by the development of society. Moreover, meaning extension is closely associated with cognitive abilities of language users.Based on the previous researches, this thesis is dedicated to the research of the working mechanism and route of meaning extension of polysemous words. It is assumed that metaphor plays a crucial role in the process of meaning extension. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) maintain that metaphor, rather than a figure of speech, is universal in human language, highlighting the basic concepts in people's mind. It operates with the projection from the source domain to the target domain with features in the source domain transferred to and integrated with those in the target domain.In this thesis, A particular word OPEN was selected in the English language serving for a case study with the aim at finding out conceptual relationships among all the associated senses and the network of meaning extension. A large amount of data was collected from dictionaries and corpus, and then further assorted, classified and analyzed. After the preliminary research, a hypothesis was thus proposed. The lexical item OPEN possesses only one single core meaning from which other senses are extended. It denotes the state of being disclosed and then the action of removing the cover of a container, causing a change of state as a result of that motion in spatial domain. Under the impetus of metaphor, the senses extend to the temporal domain embodying the extension from concrete domains to abstract ones. CONTAINER is one of the basic image schemas grounded in people's bodily experiences. A container acquires an interior area, an exterior area and a boundary. By metaphorical projection, containers may be applied to the domain of space, time, social groups and activities etc. Accordingly, senses of the word OPEN extends into other semantic fields.Up to now, enormous efforts have been made to study polysemy in the semantic field, while research on polysemy on syntactic level is relatively limited. In this thesis, an attempt is made to explore the interrelationship among different parts of speech of a single polysemous lexical item with the purpose of finding out whether there exists an extension mechanism in various parts of speech. Under the guidance of the theory of optional prominence proposed by Langacker(1987), OPEN with its various parts of speech is studied. Researches show that when OPEN is an adjective, it occurs in the domain of state, depicting the predictive and attributive features of objects. The stative perspective of OPEN profiles only a single relational configuration, while the motion part of the word involves a process composed of a continuous series of component states with the final state particularly protruding against the overall process.