Polysemous Words: How Chinese EFL Students Make Sense Of Their Core And Figurative Meanings

Polysemy is prevalent in language. It is one of the difficult parts in language learning, especially for the figurative senses of polysemous words. Many polysemous lexical items occur more frequently in their derived figurative senses than in their original literal senses (Low, 1988). In addition, the complicate nature of polysemous words often result in the difficulty of guessing meanings in reading. Bensoussan & Laufer (1984) found that learners performed far worse on guessing the meaning of polysemous words than on guessing the meaning of other words. How to provide the effective strategy of teaching meanings will contribute to the guessing and retention of the figurative senses of polysemous words.To know the internal meaning relation is beneficial to learning polysemous words. Diachronically and synchronically, polysemous words have primary and derived meaning, core and peripheral meaning. The multiple meanings of these words are by nature related and are motivated. They are transferred from the primary meaning by devices of metaphor and metonymy. Concatenation and radiation are the two processes of meaning development. In general, the semantic link between a core sense and a figurative sense is usually one that can be easily discovered and understood, but the link between two figurative senses may not be so clear (Verspoor& Lowie, 2003).In cognitive linguistics, polysemy is regarded as a categorizing phenomenon, i.e., related meanings of words form categories centering around a prototype and bearing family resemblance relations to one another. Thus, polysemous words have prototype meaning and extended meanings. And cognitive linguists have shown that metaphor and metonymy are powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories (Ungerer & Schmid, 2001). This way is fully reflected in polysemy. Consequently, interpreting polysemy from cognitive approach can help learners know the development processes of multiple meanings, which facilitates their learning of the meanings of polysemous words.The current study intends to investigate guessing and learning of the figurativesenses of polysemous words by two groups of Chinese EFL college students. The thesis aims at answering the following questions: (1) Whether the students provided with a core sense will result in better guessing of figurative senses of polysemous words than those provided with a non-core sense? (2) Whether the students provided with a core sense will lead to better short-term retention of figurative senses of polysemous words than those provided with a non-core sense? (3) Whether the students provided with a core sense will lead to better long-term retention of figurative senses of polysemous words than those provided with a non-literal sense?The method used in this study is mainly the vocabulary tests of 16 polysemous words the author designed. The subjects involved in the study were 74 freshmen of both English major and non-English major from Weinan Teachers' College, Shaanxi, China. They were randomly divided into two groups according to the experimental conditions. The tests were carried out in the students' regular classes including two stages: in the first stage the guessing and the short-term retention of the figurative senses of polysemous words were tested. Two weeks later, the long-term retention test of the figurative senses of polysemous words was administered. And then scoring was performed and SPSS software was applied for statistical analysis.The analysis and discussion result in some findings: first, providing core sense to students can help them guess the figurative senses of unfamiliar polysemous words than providing non-core sense. Because providing the core sense enables learners to create meaningful links between core sense and peripheral senses, helping them to interpret the figurative senses. Second, compared with the peripheral sense, providing core sense to students will not affect the short-term retention of the figurative senses of polysemous words. Third, providing core sense to students at the guessin...