A Corpus-based Cognitive Approach To The Polysemous Human Body-part

Polysemy, a universal phenomenon in human language system, has been studied by scholarsboth at home and abroad over the years. They have attempted to explain the essence of polysemyfrom various perspectives via different approaches. The traditional approaches represented byStructuralism tend to emphasize either the semantic features of the senses of a word or the innerstructures of language, neglecting the underlying cognitive mechanisms and motivations forsemantic extension; consequently, they fail to account for the essence of polysemy. Nevertheless,the emergence and development of Cognitive Linguistics provide a fresh perspective topolysemy researches. It breaks the bonds of traditional approaches and takes human cognitiveactivities into consideration. It claims language is the product of cognitive processing based uponinteraction between human and the objective world, and that polysemization is the process of aword’s core meaning extending to other related senses as a result of human cognitiveconceptualization and categorization. Metaphor and metonymy are the two vital cognitive toolswhich motivate the semantic extension of polysemes.Polysemous body-part words have always been a hot issue in the field of polysemy studies.On the one hand, human body-part words are basic-level words which tend to generate polysemy.On the other hand, human beings experience everything with their own bodies; as a result, theyare accustomed in taking their bodies as the standard of measuring the surrounding world.People’s understanding of the world is formed in the process of their interactions with the worldthrough their own bodies. Therefore, bodies are the starting point of people’s cognition of theworld, and concepts of body-part words can be viewed as the meta-concept of human cognition.The research of polysemous body-part words is quite representative for the cognitive analysis ofpolysemous phenomenon.Based upon major theories of prototype theory, conceptual metaphor and metonymy withinthe framework of cognitive linguistics, this thesis carries out case studies of six polysemousbody-part words, namely, face, mouth, back, arm, stomach and spleen. It adopts a more scientificcorpus-based method to collect data, and employs both quantitative and qualitative approachesfor data analysis, aiming to explore the links between various senses of a polyseme and find outsome potential features of human cognitive mechanism as well as the construction process ofsemantic extension.In light of prototype theory, various senses of a polysemous body-part word constitute acategory linked by semantic chains, in which its core meaning is viewed as the prototypical one,while other senses are extended around this prototypical sense via metaphor or metonymy. All those extended senses have family resemblance. Through a thorough analysis of our case studiesof six polysemous body-part words, this thesis notes that:(1) Extended senses of differentbody-part words show differences both in number aspect and semantic content aspect, which areclosely related with different degrees of human’s bodily experience and distinct emphasis ofcognitive salience.(2) Similarity and contiguity are the two cornerstones of meaningconstruction of body-part words. When activation of appropriate conditions leads people toperceive and realize any obvious or potential similarity and contiguity between familiar thingsand unfamiliar ones, they will take advantage of the former to understand the latter.(3) Metaphorand metonymy are two important instruments for meaning extension of body-part words andthey follow particular mapping patterns. The metaphorical mapping patterns include two maintypes, i.e. the mapping from body domain to non-body domains, and the mapping from non-bodydomains to body domain. Metonymic mappings only occur within the body domain, eithervertically transferred from the body part to the whole or horizontally transferred between bodyparts (Body Part for its Particular Function, Body Part for its Action, Body Part for its Production,as well as Body Part for its Other Attributes).(4) Different features of metaphorical andmetonymic cognition are presented in the sense extension of polysemous body-part words.Metaphorical extension is characterized by asymmetric and partial in mapping, and analogy inthinking, while metonymic cognition is characterized by the highlighting of different aspects of abody part and the highlighting of an implication. In conclusion, as to polysemous body partwords, the mechanism of its meaning extension is as follows: there exist some similar orcontiguous attributes between human body parts and other things, and as a result of cognitivesalience, one certain aspect of the similarity or contiguity will be highlighted. Then body-partwords can be used to refer to other things after cross-domain projection via metaphor or domainshift via metonymy, accordingly, new senses are constructed effectively in this process.This thesis has positive practical value in the area of vocabulary teaching and learning,especially the teaching and learning of polysemous words. As a tentative exploration to theessence of polysemy, this thesis has some limitations as well. Further studies should expand thescale of research and explore a better supporting method.