On Polysemy From The Perspective Of Cognitive Semantics

Polysemy exists in almost every language of the world, especially in English. So English has been called a"polysemous language". In fact, the presence of polysemy is the result of the development of human language, for it can well embody the economy principle. Polysemy has long been the focus of linguistic study. Different theories have been proposed by scholars of many linguistic schools, however, none of them are thought to be adequate.Along with the rapid development of cognitive science, we have gradually realized that the relationships between polysemy and its forms are arbitrary, but the different sub-senses of one polysemous word connect with each other. That is to say, those different sub-senses are the extensions of the central meaning of an independent polysemy. This thesis tries analyzing polysemy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in order to explain the relations among a word's different meanings and the internal mechanism of polysemy.This thesis is divided into three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion.In the introduction part, the author reviews several early studies on polysemy and semantics, and then clarifies the research objectives of the thesis.The main body of the thesis contains three chapters. Chapter one consists of two parts. The first part introduces the polysemy by analyzing its definition, and then employs some classic arguments as well as the author's own understandings for researching. Then the author makes several studies about the occurrence and recognition of polysemy in order to offer our thesis some background knowledge. The second part starts with some examples and explains them in detail; the author hires several English and Chinese examples for further understanding of polysemy.There are four parts in chapter two. The first part gives us a general introduction to traditional semantics. In this part, the definition and development of semantics, as well as some classical theories put forward by different schools have been introduced. Traditional structuralism linguists are likely to analyze polysemy in accordance with the classic categorization theory, however, the theory has already been proved as having many limitations. Componential analysis is an extraordinary outcome of structuralism linguistic school, but people have gradually found that the method can't explain the majority of complex compound words and propositions. Another important theoretical basis of traditional study is that they believe one form can has only one meaning. But when referring to polysemy and homonymy, we have several pairs of"signifier-signify"relations. So structuralism linguists can only consider the polysemy as an unconventional phenomenon. The second part pays attention to the role played by componential analysis in explaining polysemy. This part starts from the introduction of definition and the operational mechanism of componential analysis, then studied some instances. Part three first reviews the semantic field theory, then analyzes its application in explaining polysemy. The fourth part discusses some existing deficiencies of traditional semantics and also gives some exemplifications.Chapter three mainly studies polysemy from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It has four components. Part one gives us a general introduction to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. This part first reviews the history of cognitive semantics, then begins to focus on some main accomplishments of it in order to explain why we consider cognitive semantics as new. The second part starts from the study of categorization and prototype theory, and analyzes some related examples to test its interpreting force. Different from traditional semantics, cognitive semantics takes prototype theory as its basis for categorization. The scholars think all the sub-senses of one single form are the extensions of the prototype item, which can offer a new angle to our study. The third part studies another classical theory, conceptual metaphor. It is known that metaphor is the most basic phenomenon in our languages. By mapping different domains, we may uncover the working mechanism of polysemy. The fourth part has listed another two important theories in cognitive semantics for comprehensive study. They are image schemas and conceptual metonymy.The last component of the thesis is the conclusion part. This part first makes a brief review of the whole thesis, then put forward some author's own understandings of polysemy and some notions about cognitive semantics. The cognitive semantics will definitely be the development direction of the whole semantics world. At the same time, the author has also listed some shortcomings of the paper for future study.