A Study On The Application Of Category Theory To English Vocabulary Acquisition

Language is an important tool of communication, in which vocabulary formsone of the three basic components of language. Vocabulary is regarded as thefoundation of all language abilities and it plays an important role in humancommunication. The shortage of vocabulary severely limits the improvement oflanguage learners basic skills including listening, speaking, reading, writing andtranslation as well as everyday communication. To some extent, a learner s languagelevel is determined by his or her vocabulary. For most language learners, however,nothing is more difficult than vocabulary acquisition. As time goes on, the great statusof vocabulary has been relocated by many scholars, who begin to recognize thatvocabulary is the primary aspect to learn English well even it is learned as a secondlanguage in China.Therefore, in order to explore a scientific strategy to acquire vocabulary morequickly and efficiently, many scholars and linguists have done a lot of researches andmany academic writings and theories have been presented and put forward. Cognitivelinguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language，which is based onhuman experiences to the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it.Category theory is one of the most important components of cognitive linguistics,which is considered to have great assistance in vocabulary acquisition. Prototypecategory theory and basic level category theory are two fundamental theories ofcognitive linguistics that require attaching much importance to the basic levelvocabulary and semantic relations of words so that the learners can form a semanticnetwork in their minds and thus memorize a large number of vocabularies. So thisthesis will try to apply the category theory, especially prototype category theory andbasic level category theory to English vocabulary acquisition, so that the Englishlearners are able to memorize more vocabulary in a more quickly and efficient wayand thus improve their comprehensive abilities of using English.In this thesis, the author will have an experiment under the guidance of categorytheory to testify the efficiency of vocabulary acquisition with the help of this theory, which will be described in detail in Chapter Three. During the experiment, the authorwill firstly have a research on the current situation of English vocabulary acquisitionof the English learners in the form of questionnaire. It can be concluded from theresult of the research that most of the English learners learning strategies are not soappropriate that their vocabulary is insufficient. Under this background information,two parallel classes at Chengdu University of Technology are chosen as experimentalclass and ordinary class respectively to implement the experiment. In order to makesure the accuracy and reliability of the experiment, the author has a pretest first totestify whether the English level of the two classes is similar or not. Then the studentsof the two classes are required to acquire English vocabularies in different methodsand a posttest is implemented later. After the data collection and analysis, it can beconcluded that the students in the experimental class, who are taught to apply thecategory theory to vocabulary acquisition, acquired vocabularies more accurate andefficient. Therefore, a conclusion can be drawn that the category theory increases thevocabulary acquisition efficiency to a large extent according to the result of theexperiment. It is convinced that with the development and maturity of cognitivelinguistics, this method of vocabulary acquisition will be more scientific andsystematic.