A Cognitive Contrastive Study On The Polysemy Of Human Body Words From The Perspective Of Metaphor And Metonymy

Polysemy is not only a rather common phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon.Traditional researches focus on internal distinguishes between senses of a polysemy andoverlook their relations. Cognitive linguistics pays particular emphasis on the cognitivemechanism underlying polysemy, namely on the basis of cognition, the polysemy aregenerated through metaphor and metonymy. Among all the researches on polysemy, thepolysemy of human body words plays the most striking role. On one hand, human beingsfollow the cognitive principles of getting to know the world from near to distant, simple tocomplex, and concrete to abstract. On the other hand, due to it belongs to basic vocabulary,which is easy to produce polysemy. Hence human body words become the foundation ofbodily experiences to perceive and measure the outside world. Therefore, the polsyemy ofhuman body words become one of the hottest issues of the current cognitive linguistics.Previous scholars have made a lot of achievements in human body words from the semantic,cultural, anthropological and cognitive perspective, but there still exist some commonproblems: in current studies, the researchers apply more conceptual metaphor theories andscarcely the conceptual metonymy or put the metaphor theories directly in the domain ofmetaphor. Besides, the case study of human body words is relatively scarce, especially thecase study on "head".Based on the above common problems, the author takes conceptual metaphor andmetonymy of cognitive linguistics as the framework of this thesis, which play an essentialdirective role to contrastively analyze English and Chinese human body words. This thesisemploys the qualitative method, descriptive and explanation method, contrastive approach;collect various senses of English and Chinese "head" and relative corpus concerning "head"from the latest, authoritative and reliable dictionaries. Senses of "head" in English andChinese dictionaries are collected firstly and grouped, classified from the perspective ofmetaphor and metonymy in order to figure out its prototype meaning of two languages andanalyze the meaning extension mechanism of different senses in a polysemy. Then this thesiscontrastively analyzes the various senses of "head" in English and Chinese from theperspective of metaphor and metonymy. At the same time, the reasons of these similaritiesand differences are explored.The findings show that:(1) the polysemy is based cognition and generated throughmetaphor and metonymy. No matter in English or Chinese, the prototype meaning of "head"is the same; the meaning extension is almost the same, via metaphor and metonymy.(2) InEnglish and Chinese languages, there are similarities and diversities of "head".(3) These similarities are due to cognitive commonalities while the differences are owing to culturalrelativity. These findings are helpful in vocabulary teaching and learning.