A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemy Of The Adjective Dirty In The Moral Realm

The word dirty has been regarded as polysemous in linguistics and it has attractedless attention of many linguists and scholars. The expressions with the word dirty suchas dirty clothes, dirty floor, dirty player, dirty work, dirty laundry, etc. are anoften-noted phenomenon in linguistics, but relatively little attention has been paid to thepolysemy of the adjective dirty compared with the great deal of research on thepolysemy of nouns and verbs. Different scholars at home and abroad have studied theadjective dirty. Most of them pay attention only to the definitions of the word dirty,without considering the reasoning and motivation of its different meanings. This thesismainly focuses on how the extended meanings of the word dirty are achieved in themoral realm from the cognitive perspective.Firstly, a brief review of the previous studies of the word dirty is made in thisthesis. Then, the thesis takes the theory of categorization, the conceptual metaphortheory and the experiential grounding theory as theoretical foundation. And theconceptual metaphor theory has been mainly introduced including the nature ofconceptual metaphor and the ontological metaphor. In the main part of this thesis, theprototypical meaning and the extended meanings of the word dirty are discussed andmost of the extended meanings are explained in terms of conceptual metaphor. Themechanism of the extended meanings of the word dirty has been explored throughcategorization of actions, actors, dirty settings, government and politics and culturalresonance. The study provides a relatively unified framework for the understanding ofthe use of dirty metaphors in the moral realm. This thesis indicates that the distinction ofdirty and clean is significant for the study of broader cultural issues such as immigration,disease and so on. And the extended uses of the word dirty originate from humanbeings’ experiences and can be explained with the conceptual metaphor theory. Finally,the writer describes the polysemous meanings of the word dirty in the moral realm andexplains the internal relationship between the extended meanings derived from theprototypical meaning. The result of the thesis proves that polysemy is a commonphenomenon in language and the extensions are based on human experience and realized by the means of metaphor and metonymy.Based on the previous researches on the word dirty, this thesis provides a relativelyunified understanding on the extended uses of dirty in the moral realm such as“immoral”,“corrupt”,“dishonest”,“offensive”, and “abominable”, etc. from a freshperspective, which can be considered as a complement of the study of the word dirty.