| Polysemantic verbs are commonly used in daily spoken and written language due to their conciseness in form and vividness in expression. However, they are extremely difficult for English learners to master since their meanings are considered as unpredictable and unrelated. Therefore, many traditional linguistic schools and linguists began to put their efforts on the study of the semantics of polysemantic verbs. Yet soon their research methods revealed shortcomings since traditional linguistics tried to explore semantics of polysemantic verbs from external causes such as historical and social reasons regardless of people's cognitive competence.So in this thesis, we will adopt a new way to explore the meaning of polysemantic verbs. And this paper takes GET and its phrasal verbs for consideration, trying to explore the mechanism of meaning construction of Get and its corresponding phrasal verbs from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.And this thesis consists of five chapters in total. In Chapter one, a short introduction will be presented first with the purpose and significance of the study as its main content.And Chapter two is the literature review part which shows people some former researchers'achievements on polysemantic verbs.Chapter three is mainly about the theoretical framework and the methodology of this thesis.Chapter four constitutes the main body of the thesis. In this part, the various meanings of the verb GET, particles (IN, UP, OFF and THROUGH) and the phrasal verbs (get in, get up, get off and get through) will be analysed in detail, which proves that although the various meanings of GET and get phrasal verbs are distinct, they are related with each other and form a semantic network around the prototypical meaning.Chapter five is the conclusion part.
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