The Conceptualization Of Polysemy Category: Taking EYE As A Case Study

The study of polysemy has a long history in the philosophy of language, psychology and literature. Formalism, structuralism and cognitivism are the influential schools of linguistic studies. Their approaches to polysemy differ with each other. The thesis starts with a brief literature review on these approaches. Negligence of defining and explaining polysemy is the weak point of the formal approach. The structualistic approach, although providing an invaluable tool in explaining semantic change and polysemy, interprets polysemy without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanism. The cognitive approach provides a more thorough and systematic analysis of polysemy, in which metaphor has been considered as the main cognitive mechanism, but little attention has been paid to metonymy which is in fact more ubiquitous in everyday language.This thesis aims at finding the mechanism and internal structures of the semantic microstructure of the polyseme EYE as a prototypical and schematic category from a cognitive perspective within the theoretical framework of the interaction, both synchronic and diachronic, between metonymy, metaphor and schema.Three characteristics of category summarized at the end of the thesis based on the preceding analysis in the thesis can best represent the findings of the thesis. First of all, a polysemy category with various senses is brought into shape through an approximately human-universal cognitive process. No matter what culture we are in, we use metaphor and metonymy underlying a great deal of the structure of language to reason and base our actions on. Metonymy-based metaphor is a major and indispensable part of our ordinaryand conventional way in conceptualizing the world. ! Metaphor and metonymy are not only a matter of language, but of thought and reason. That is to say, they are universal tools for people from any culture. This thesis argues that metonymically highlighted subdomains according to certain contexts always activate metaphor.A model that accounts for this can be presented as follows: General metonymies "PART FOR WHOLE" and "WHOLE FOR PART" are always available when we speak of or think about something because our schema in mind will automatically scan all the features of certain object according to certain context, and foreground certain (usu. prototypical) but never all of the features. Those chosen foregrounded features will be mapped from a concrete (familiar) domain onto an abstract (unfamiliar) domain to label the newly-born entity (B), combining with the its inherent feature(s) (in). That is the most direct evidence to show metonymy antecedes metaphor.Secondly, all the senses of a polysemy category are parametered by culture. Culture, ^schema in this thesis, is the total patterns 4of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action and artifacts and dependent upon man's capacity for learning the use of tools, language and systems of abstract thought. The path of metaphor and metonymy is closely related with, even decided by, culture, as a consequence of the close relationship between cognition and culture. Metaphor and metonymy are based on our bodily experience, and then trigger the different paths of metaphor and metonymy in different cultures. Take "EYE" and "眼眼" as example, we have got "(棋)眼" in Chinese but no equivalent expressionsuch as "chess eye " iri English. We can safely say that different cultures (schemas) select different directions to develop their meaning category.Thirdly, all the senses of polysemy are modulated by context. From a diachronic point of view, a polysemy category is shaped, maintained and modified by the pressure of language use. The process of forming polysemy is one of changing an accidental use into a dictionary sense, hence enriching the meaning category of a lexical item. A new sense of a word comes into being because of the on-the-spot need in a certain context. If the sense is tested and fossilized by this context gradually, it will come to be a standard member of the meaning c...