| Polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon that has been drawing overseas and domestic researchers’attention for many years. The extension of word meanings results from categorization and conceptualization. Categorization is the mental process in which people classify the whole world. Nowadays, with the development of the society, an increasing number of concepts are being extended constantly, and people need to use new meanings of words. Therefore, the phenomenon of polysemy emerges.This thesis is based on the prototype principle of categorization in cognitive linguistics. Through the theory of family resemblance and prototype principle, the study of polysemous words is to find out relations between the basic meanings and the extended meanings, which means how the word meaning expands. Based on the internal structure of polysemy, combining some theory about metaphor and metonymy, the thesis aims to analyze different meanings of one word. Prototype theory provides concrete evidence for this phenomenon. According to prototype theory, the extended meanings of a word evolve from prototypical meaning, and different meanings show different degrees of family resemblance. The author utilizes these theories and examples to analyze polysemy from different perspectives, attempting to discover the regularities of how polysemy is used in English news discourse.The findings of the thesis are as follows:the relationship among different meanings of one word is not independent but relevant. The extended meanings all derived from the prototypical meaning through radiation and concatenation. Metaphor and metonymy are two main cognitive mechanisms for meaning extension. Through the analysis of the part of speech of notional words in news discourse, radiation extension can be classified by function, shape and specialty. Concatenation extension has the characteristics of directionality and calculability. Such regularities can all be effective approaches to analyze polysemy in news discourse. |
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