A Dictionary-Based Study Of Word Polysemy

Polysemous study is one of the hottest topics in cognitive linguistics. Langacker(1991)[1] and other linguists have all made some researches into this phenomenon, yet their study remains to be an assumptious nature because they just studied some individual words. So although these studies are helpful in improving our understanding of polysemous words, many things remain to be a mystery.This dissertation, based on some established theories of cognitive linguistics, forms an assumption about word meaning formation, and then it discusses the inter relations of the meanings of polysemous words from the dictionaries in detail.The dissertation consists of four parts. The first part explains the purpose of this paper and gives a brief introduction to the history of the study of lexical meaning, and especially the psychological orientation in semantic study. At the same time, this part elucidates the cognitive philosophy of language, and its subjectiveness in linguistic studies. After introducing the relations held between the real world, cognition and lexical meaning in a cognitive point of view, the second part puts forward an assumption of meaning formation; it further brings out a framework for polysemous study. In the aspect of meaning formation, cognitive linguists thought that gestalt principle and family resemblance play an important role in human categorization and conceptualization. But in cognitive linguistics, meaning, category, and concept have the same content, thus we can reasonably assume that the formation of meaning abide by the same rules as category. The semantic structure of words should also as that of category, that is to say, it contains basic and extended meanings, and a reason can be found in those basic meanings for extended meanings. Thus a framework for polysemous study is established. In addition, this part introduces the theory of cultural model and metaphor. The third part makes an investigation into the meanings of words in dictionaries. This part is not meant to be inclusive, it included words for concrete object and organism, a case study of prepositional word and verbal word, and finally, we discussed emotional words. In the final part, we conclude that the formation of meaning is closely related to human cognition of the surrounding world. Those prominent features in basic meanings often serve as the base for meaning extension. In this process, similarity plays an important role; it brings all subjects that have a similarity or a perceived similarity into the meaning of words. At the same time, cultureand other factors also contribute to the enrichment of meaning in polysemous words...