A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Polysemy Of English Verbs Based On Prototype Theory

Polysemy is a common phenomenon in different languages,and it has been the concern of linguistic researches,especially semantics.The traditional semantics mainly accentuates the importance of semantic analysis,but ignores the cognitive ability of human beings.Besides,it has a few studies of the generation mechanism and nature of polysemy,consequently,it is not adequate for explaining polysemy,and cannot help learners to grasp polysemous words effectively.On the contrary,cognitive linguistics puts emphasis on humans' cognition,holding that the meanings of concepts are obtained on the basis of the interaction between humans and the objective world.Besides,cognitive linguistics emphasizes the embodied mind,metaphorical thought and unconscious cognition.Hence,the appearance of cognitive concept is conducive to the understanding of English vocabulary.As one of the important theories of cognitive linguistics,prototype theory emphasizes that there is a prototype and many peripheral members in a category,and they are connected by family resemblances.Among them,the prototype is most easily perceived and understood.Some linguists hold that the prototype theory can effectively explain the polysemy.In semantic category system,a polysemous word is a semantic category,among which the core meaning is considered the prototype,and the extended meanings become the peripheral members.All meanings constitute a semantic network of the polysemous word.The reason why the verb Come is chosen as the subject is that many studies of the polysemy of prepositions and nouns have been made,but there are relatively few studies on the polysemy of verbs.Besides,verbs are vitally important for English grammar,and they are also regarded as the skeleton of sentences.Furthermore,as a general verb,come has much collaboration with particles,so its meanings are complicated.Hence,the word deserves to be studied.In the framework of cognitive linguistics,this thesis attempts to research the polysemy of the English verb Come and its phrasal verbs based on the prototype theory.In this research,all data of Come are extracted from British National Corpus(BNC).There are 66,068 samples with Come in BNC,among which 500 cases are selected at random as the initial data.Through the corpus analysis,the author matches the data selected with the 13 meaning items,so as to determine the core meaning or prototypical meaning,and then analyzes the extended meanings.Finally,the semantic category network of Come is achieved.The result shows:(1)the prototypical meaning of Come is “to move to a person/place” in the 13 meaning items,and there exists some family resemblances between this meaning and other 12 meanings;(2)the prototypical meaning that is based on image schema can extend into other peripheral meanings through two cognitive devices,metaphor and metonymy.This thesis makes an attempt to explain how the prototypical meaning extends into the peripheral meanings of Come,so as to assist the English learners to study and understand the polysemous verbs and their phrasal verbs preferably.And it manifests that to some extent the prototype theory can explain some linguistic phenomena.