Contrast Analysis Of Han And Uygur College Students’ Judgement On The Prototype In Modern Polysemic Chinese

Human beings explore the world in a repeated cycle of "practice-and-know ".So does human’s understanding of languages. Among the language system, lexicalsystem changes fastest with the progress and development of human beings. As it hasthe characteristics of "openness", lexicon can also reflect the characteristics ofhuman’s understanding from practice to cognition and vice versa. Therefore, lexiconstudy has always aroused the attention of many scholars.As a common phenomenon in language, polysemy is discussed the hottestespecially in cognitive linguistics recently. Based on the principle of "familyresemblance", the prototype category theory in cognitive linguistics expounds therational relationship within the polysemous word category. It has pointed out that apolysemous word is significant at the core, and that it expands to other meanings ofpolysemous word thereafter. The rational relationship can become a difficulty inlanguage teaching. If unclear of the prototype, one may be confused about therelationship among the various meanings of the polysemous word, so it is difficult toobtain a desired result in polysemous word teaching.This paper focuses on the study of the prototype decision or judgemnt only. Ituses quantitative research methods, adopts interviews and questionnaires andanalyses the Uygurs’ and Hans’ decisions upon the prototype meaning of the top10frequency modern Chinese polysemous words and it finds that Uygur and HanChinese learners have uneven level of development to understand the polysemyprototype.Whether it is consistent or not, Uygur and Han Chinese college students aremainly inclined to a similar judgment of the prototype for the same target word. It isalso found that the learners can dynamically adjust according to their experience oflanguage to understanding the prototype of the same target. Thus, learners fromdifferent backgrounds can semantically form a consistency with the edge of thevocabulary domain of the same target word. It is thus proved to communicate andexchange effectively between those learners. Lastly, the article suggests the following two points in terms of teachingpolysemous words: one is to pay attention to students’ understanding of the prototypemeaning of polysemy and the other is to focus on the students’ dynamicunderstanding of the prototype of polysemy. It will be best if it is to combinelanguage learners’ own living experience in polysemy teaching.