The Cognitive Semantic Analysis For The Amplification And The Narrowing Of The Meaning Of Words

The amplification and narrowing of the meaning of words is a pair of converse movement of the change of the meaning of words, which is usually used for contrast research. The dissertations of previous people are mainly refined in the concept definition of the example description, the description of classification and the exploration of the property. In respect of this, this paper basing on the already having achievement, adopts the statistical method of limited amount analysis, emphasizing on the systematic analysis of the amplification and narrowing of the meaning of words from the angle of semantics and cognition. The body of the paper is divided into two parts. The first part is the overall dissertation of the amplification and narrowing of the meaning of words. This part gives a conclusion of the research history of the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words. Firstly, it gives a definition for the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words; secondly, it comments on the description research of previous people; thirdly, it affirms that the method of limited amount of vocabulary and cognitive semantic analysis providing a new research angle and method for the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words. The second part is the cognitive semantic analysis for the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words. First, it adopts the limited amount analysis in a closed domain basing on the language resource provided by Modern Chinese Dictionary(the revised edition of 2002), and get the numerous data for the amplification, narrowing, uncertain items and the distribution of the part of speech. Second, it does primary semantic analysis basing on the materials and the statistical data, that is, to divide the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words into part and wholeness, individual and all-arroundness, the transformation of the big companion domain and the small companion domain these three parts. In the mean time, the writer holds the view that these three parts form a semantic decoding hierarchical system from the easiness to the complexity, and the concreteness to the abstractness according to the gradation of the self-sufficiency of the space, space limiting time and the inter-limiting of time,space and character.Third, it probes into the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words from the cognitive way basing on the research of semantic category and the semantic encoding. The writer thinks that both the theory of prototype categorization and the system of metonymy and metaphor in cognitive linguistics can give the explanation for the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words. The reasons are as following: (1) Both the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words and the vertical development of the individual word and the horizontal amplification of the whole part are a process of categorization. (2) Both the metonymy and the metaphor are the internal cognitive system which cause the amplification and narrowing of the meaning of words, especially the prominence principle in the metonymy which includes the thinking, language, culture and social factors and gives a plausible explanation of the amplification and the narrowing of the meaning of words. (3) According to the statistics of language resource, between the amplification of the meaning of words and the narrowing of the meaning of words,it appears a trend that the amplification will take the advantage; and it can be found a breakthrough point of research for the uncertain items from the cognitive way. The novelty of this paper lies in that: firstly, view the amplification and narrowing of semantic meaning as an integrated whole, by means of closed-domain quantitative statistics, make descriptions from a multi-layer and multi-respective points, abstract the inner static semantic system, and make further conclusions on some general laws in order to make it more scientific. Secondly, make full use of category prototype, metaphor and metonymy an...