A Cognitive Approach To English Polysemy

Polysemous words refer to those that have a number of related senses or interpretations. Lexical polysemy, the most prevailing and the most important semantic phenomenon in English, has attracted great attention from many schools and different theories have been put forward. Pitifully, the traditional studies more or less have many limitations. So the issue of analyzing polyseme well is still unsolved.The main approaches by which cognitive linguistics is represented today are identified by Ungerer and Schmid(2001) as:the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view of language. These three approaches serves as the methodological foundation for theories of cognitive linguistic. Cognition is the basis of language and it is of great significance to bring cognition into linguistic field. This is undoubtedly a big step forward to the linguistic research and speeds up the birth of cognitive linguistic. As a new approach to word meaning, cognitive linguistics reveals the motivation of language formation through the cognitive model based on the outside world experience, where human beings experience is highly emphasized. Theoretically speaking, cognitive linguistics provides a new perspective and a more convincing way to polysemy analysis. The theory of categorization and prototype provides us with the theoretical foundation for the polysemous category. The different meanings of a polysemous word may form a polysemous structure in which the core meaning is taken as the prototype and the extended meanings as peripheral members.Three cognitive mechanisms of meaning extension are image schema, metaphor and metonymy. Image schema enjoys the fundamental status in cognitive linguistics owing to its character of being relevant to how human beings explain conceived experience and environment. Image schema theory is important in studies of polysemy. Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool for our conceptualization of abstract categories rather than the matter of language. People can map the elements from a concrete source domain onto elements of an abstract, intangible domain. According to Lakoff (1987), metonymy is to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use it to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect of it, and one can not simply say that any thing can stand for any thing else in the right context, rather stand for something based on idealized cognitive model(ICM).Image schema is the.source of many bunches of metaphors and metonymies and also of many single metaphors and metonymies. Therefore, image schema provides the force of perspectivization, and metonymy antecedes metaphor. The three cognitive mechanisms are closely related, forming an assembly line in terms of their sequence in thinking at the beginning of which is image schema. It arises from sensory, experience and precedes the formation of concepts, working as the basis for conceptualization. Most of the relationship among the polysemes is through the motivation of image schema. Image schema plays a basic role in metonymy-based metaphor in which metonymy serves as the antecedent. Image schema, metonymy, and metaphor serve as the three cognitive instruments in the meaning extension of polysemous categories.This thesis, employing the interpretive approach, carries out a study of polysemy from the perspective of cognition within the relevant theoretical framework of image schema, metaphor and metonymy. The goal of the thesis is to find the formation process as well as semantic extension mechanisms of polysemy. The present study is intended to throw some light on the researches of polysemous words.The representatives of polysemous words:the polysemous preposition from, the color word red and the body part word eye are analyzed as examples to demonstrate the application of the cognitive theories to the analysis of the motivation of polysemy, showing that through interactions with the outside world, a polysemous word forms its basic meaning and builds up its image schema. Through metaphor or metonymy the image schema as the source domain is mapped onto another domain or within the same domain. Thus we could find that there is a motivating factor to the relationship of different senses of a polysemous word. That's to say, linguistic forms do not acquire new senses at random. These cognitive mechanisms are the motivation of the development of word meaning as they indicate the nature and features of lexical polysemy. Besides, the motivation of polysemy is evidence of motivation of the language sign, which makes a complement to Saussure's theory of arbitrariness. Meaning of language is the result of interaction between human cognition and objective world.