The Construction And Cognitive Analysis Of Polysemy Network Of Through

Starting from Aristotle,polysemy has attracted much attention in many fields such as logic,philosophy,and psychology,and it is one of the research focuses of linguistics.Since the 1980 s,with the rise of cognitive linguistics,linguists have changed the interpretation of polysemy.Cognitive linguists believe that the multiple senses of a polysemic word are not a collection of unrelated elements.Instead they are closely linked to human experience and perception of the world.Tyler and Evans proposed a Principled Polysemy Mode for prepositional polysemy on the basis of previous scholars' research.Just based on Tyler and Evans' Principled Polysemy Mode,this thesis discusses the polysemy network of the preposition through.As one of the most commonly used prepositions,through plays an important role in our daily communication.By analyzing studies on prepositions at home and abroad,the author finds that there are less research for prepositions through.Thus it is necessary to study the preposition through.Two research questions are discussed in this thesis:(1)how to construct the polysemy network of through?(2)What is the cognitive mechanism underlying the semantic extension of through? This thesis combines the methods of description and interpretation,and tries to construct and analyze the polysemy network of the English preposition through on the basis of a large amount of linguistic data,which come from five English dictionaries and Corpus of Contemporary American(COCA).At first,this thesis summarizes 16 typical meanings of the preposition through according to five authoritative dictionaries.Then it identifies the primary sense of preposition through-the trajector traverses the bounded landmark.And there are nine distinct senses derived from the primary sense,which forms a highly-motivated polysemy network.The author believes that image schema theory and metaphor theory are cognitive mechanisms for the semantic extension of preposition through.Four of the distinct senses of the preposition through have been derived from the transformation of the intention schema,and other distinct senses are derived from metaphorical extension.They are projected from the spatial domain to the event domain,time domain,means domain,and cause and reason domain.In the past several decades,the research of polysemy has achieved considerable development.Based on the discussion of the polysemy network of the English preposition through,this paper attempts to explore the explanatory power of Principled Polysemy Model for preposition polysemy networks.It may broaden the horizon of polysemy research and contribute a little to deepening our understanding of polysemy.This paper can provide English learners with more effective vocabulary learning methods.To a certain extent,it can also help lexicographers to better set up and interpret meaning items.