The Application Of Prototypical Category Theory To The Teaching Of English Polysemy

In English vocabulary, polysemy is a pervasive and essential phenomenon. Simply speaking, if one word carries at least two meanings, it can be called a polysemous word. According to Blutner, polysemy refers to the phenomenon that one lexical unit may be associated with a whole range of meanings which are related to each other in a systematic way. Many linguists have done researches on polysemy from different angles, this thesis tries to study polysemy from a new perspective and give some insights into the teaching and learning of polysemy.Previous studies of polysemy haven't grasped the essence of it and can't give a satisfactory and convincing explanation on polysemy. Structural semantics sets too much emphasis on the internal structure of language while the external one which involves the relationship between languages, the external world and cognitive process are neglected. And Saussure's arbitrariness theory fails to explain the different but closely related meanings of a polyseme. The emergence and development of prototypical category provides a new perspective on polysemy. According to prototypical category, a polysemy usually has a core meaning, or prototypical meaning, which is the most central and primary. All the peripheral meanings are related with the prototypical meaning on the basis of family resemblances. Thus, the related meanings constitute a category with the core meaning as the prototype. The meaning extension of a polysemous word is realized through metaphor, metonymy and image schema. So it can be concluded that the meaning extension of polysemy is motivated. Metaphor, metonymy and image schema are the factors to motivate semantic enrichment.Under the influence of traditional studies, different meanings of a polysemous word are considered as isolated and unrelated, which caused great troubles both for English teachers and students. English Teachers consistently encourage students to infer meanings from context, while some researches have already proved that it cannot improve students' long-term retention. The method adopted by most students is learning by glossary, different meanings are not acquired in a systematic way, so the results are not good as what people expect.In order to be clear about students'mastery on polysemy and whether prototypical category theory can shed some lights to the teaching and learning of polysemous words, fifty first-year non-English major students from Hubei University of Education are selected as research subjects. They will be divided into two classes randomly with twenty-five in each. Class One is taken as the experimental class (EC), and Class Two the control class (CC). For the experimental class, the approach under the guidance of prototypical theory will be adopted, while for the control class, the teacher just adopts the traditional methods.During the research, two vocabulary tests concerning polysemy are given to subjects. Test one is aiming at identifying whether the students are good at mastering polysemy or not and pre-test two is intended to distinguish what are the main problems that students encounter in their learning of polysemy. The data obtained from the tests indicates that subjects do not have a satisfactory mastery on polysemous words and their main problems lie in that they have trouble recognizing three major kinds of motivations of polysemy. But after applying prototypical category theory to the teaching of polysemous words for two months, as demonstrated by the results of post-test two, there is a significant difference on two classes'scores. The result shows that students from the experimental class have a better understanding of polysemy and the retention of polysemy's meaning last much longer. So it can be concluded that the new teaching method based on the theory of prototypical category is efficient and feasible and plays a positive role in the process of polysemous words acquisition.