A Cognitive Study Of Semantic Extension Of Body-related Nouns

Human body is the basis for the perception of the world and also the starting point of our cognition to the surroundings. Because of the long process of semantic extension, more concepts of body-related nouns have come into being. In the past decades, many researches about body-related nouns have been done by linguists at home and abroad. Most of them focus on the study of metaphor and metonymy in the analyses of semantic extension of English body-related nouns, ignoring the important role that metaphtonymy and image schema have played in the process of semantic extension. Thus more efforts should be made to do a systematic and in-depth study of semantic extension of English body-related nouns from cognitive perspective. The present paper will analyze the semantic extension of English body-related nouns in terms of metaphor, metonymy, metaphor-metonymy interaction and image schema, in order to find the cognitive mechanisms of semantic extension of body-related nouns and its implication for English language teaching and learning, at the same time to improve people’s language learning ability.Compared with previous studies, the present research has its own findings which are as follows:1. The previous cognitive studies of semantic extension of body-related nouns are mostly confined in body parts such as "eye","ear","nose","leg","tooth", etc., while very few studies include the internal organs. The present paper does a cognitive analysis of "heart", which is the most important organ of human beings, in order to make our research more convincing.2. Metaphor and metonymy are two ways of thinking, which are the major cognitive mechanisms of the semantic change of body-related nouns. Many researchers use metaphor to analyze body-related nouns in terms of its shape, position and function. In this paper, the similarity of importance is also regarded as one trigger of metaphorical mapping. Based on the past researches, metonymy is also one cognitive mechanism of semantic extension. And body parts always stand for a whole person, emotion, function and act. But according to the present study, English body-related nouns can represent a person’s personality and classifier as well.3. In addition to metaphor and metonymy, metaphor-metonymy interaction is also an important reason for semantic extension. In the previous studies, researchers only mentioned metaphor-metonymy interaction when analyzing semantic extension of body parts, and never did detailed studies. In Chapter Five, the author tries to deepen the analysis to see how great influence the metaphor-metonymy has on semantic extension, especially on that of English body-related nouns, which finally summarizes three ways of metaphor-metonymy interaction:entity, space and container.4. The present paper attaches great importance to image schema mechanism in the semantic extension of English body-related nouns. Image schemas are usually used to analyze the meaning of verbs and prepositions, seldom being used in the study of nouns. This dissertation tries to present the semantic extension of English body-related nouns from the perspective of image schema, which, on the one hand, helps to directly observe their semantic extension, on the other hand prove that image schema is a universal cognitive mechanism with great explanatory power.According to what have been mentioned, metaphor, metonymy, metaphor-metonymy interaction and image schema are the reasonable explanation of semantic extension of English body-related nouns. Therefore, the systematic cognitive way of thinking will provide a new horizon for the study.