A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemy Of English Motion Verbs

Polysemy, as an important linguistic phenomenon, has attracted the attention of scholars from the structuralist school, cognitive school, etc. Traditional semantic theories like componential analysis and semantic field have largely prompted the development of semantics and made great contributions to explaining the principles of polysemy phenomenon. But they are thought to overstress the research within the language system and neglect the relation between language and the outside world, which results in isolated research on lexical semantics. Different from traditional semantic schools, the cognitive school attributes all human knowledge to human cognition and experience. Accordingly, the semantics of a lexeme is the brain’s reflection of the human cognition towards the objective things. Therefore, human naturally construct the relationship between abstract category concepts and concrete category concepts, obtaining new meanings of the vocabulary from its old meaning, i.e. adopting the polysemy device to achieve the meaning variation and extension with reference to its primary meaning, this evidently and effectively eases the burden of human cognition.Cognitive linguistics provides a vital support to the polysemy research. So far, foreign and domestic researches about polysemy are mainly focused on nouns and prepositions, while a few are conducted about English verbs. On the basis of previous related researches on the polysemy of English motion verbs, this study conducts an analysis on the polysemy phenomenon of English motion verbs from a cognitive perspective under the help of the related corpus, and selects the typical motion verb run as the case of study.This thesis aims to construct the semantic network of run in terms of Lakoff’s Radical Category, and distinguish between the prototypical meaning and the non-prototypical meanings of run guided by Tyler and Evans’ s Principled Polysemy Approach. When expounding the relationship between image schemas and linguistic meaning, Evans and Green(2006: 189) hold that image schemas can serve as the conceptual representation that underpins lexical items. Hence this thesis proposes that the central image schema of a motion verb, i.e. a PATH schema of a dynamic process, represents its prototypical meaning. In the case of run, non-prototypical meanings of which can be classified into spatial domain, temporal domain, event domain and state domain. In the analysis of image schema transformation, the author integrates Langacker’s Trajector–Landmark Theory with Talmy’s Motion Event Frame, then depicts four image schemas which are supposed to be the variants of the central image schema.This thesis argues that the multiple meanings of the motion verb run can be divided into the prototypical meaning and the non-prototypical meanings, between which some kind of relevance exists. All the meanings of run share the similarity of movement. Thereinto, the prototypical meaning of run—move fast on foot is concrete and its movement is visible, whereas the non-prototypical meanings of run are abstract and their movements are hardly visible but perceivable. The prototypical meaning can extend via three mechanisms of image schema transformation, metaphorical extension and metonymic extension, which may function separately or synthetically. The present research is an analysis of English motion verbs on the polysemy from the cognitive perspective, and it may bring some enlightenments to the lexical learning and dictionary compilation to some extent.