Prototype Theory-Based Cognitive Analysis Of Verb Polysemy

Polysemy as an important and common semantic phenomenon has catched many linguists'attention, because the polysemy research has a long history. Generally speaking, words are monosemous when they are firstly used to express entities or ideas. Each thing or phenomenon is referred to by a certain words. Human cognition instantly develops with social progress and development. It is a tendency for people to associate new information with known konwledges and find their common points. They use one word to express different concepts which share similarities. And thus the monosemous word turn into polysemous word. Because polysemy has more than one different but related meanings, it has always been an annoying matter in language learning. In the field of linguistics, it is difficult to explain the evolution of polysemous word. For example, how a word changes or extends its meaning? What are the relations between the original meaning of word and extended meanings?This paper firstly introduces the polysemy and other important related concepts. Polysemy refers to a word which has two or more than two different but interrelated meanings. On this basis, this paper reviews the traditional research to polysemy and its defects. Previously, linguists research polysemy mainly from the two points of view——synchronic and diachronic, but they only start from the perspective of structuralism, emphasizing the interior of whole language system, and neglecting the process of human language learning. The development of cognitive linguistics provides more powerful tools for us to analyze polysemy. This paper, mainly based on prototype theory, metaphor and metonymy in cognitive linguistics, starts from the internal structure of polysemy and analyzes the relationship between different meanings from cognitive perspectives. Then, this paper uses prototype theory in cognitive linguistics to analyze the relations between each sense of ploysemous word. Prototype theory provides sufficient motivation for this phenomenon. According to this theory, several meanings of a word evolve from prototypical meaning, and show different degrees of family resemblance. In addition, this paper interprets some important theories in cognitive linguistics such as ICMs and family resemblance. These cognitive theories play an important role in the process of word development. Next, this paper introduces two mechanisms of semantic extension——metaphor and metonym, and analyzes how these two mechanisms work in the process of semantic extension. Metaphor plays an important role in the evolution process of meaning. Metonymy also has cognitive function. Their essence is conceptual. The working mechanism is a kind of mapping. From these analyses we find that, as human thinking basic mode, metaphor and metonymy are important means of polysemous produce.At last, this paper takes two basic verbs for instance, and analyzes the change and extension of word meaning under semantic cognitive mode in details, and further demonstrates the importance of metaphor and metonymy in semantic extension.