A Cognitive Approach To Polysemy Network

Polysemy, "the association of two or more related senses with a single linguistic form" (Taylor, 1995: 99) has received much attention in recent linguistic semantics, Since the analysis and understanding of polysemy and polysemization processes are significant for accurate reading, language acquisition, language teaching, machine translation, dictionary compiling, computational linguistics, semantics and pragmatics. Traditional approaches to polysemy overemphasized external causes such as historical, cultural and social factors and the distinctions such as polysemy and homonymy, polysemy and monosemy without grasping the nature of polysemy.With the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the 1980s, polysemy has been one of its foci. Scholars have done research into polysemy, but disagreed with each other on the frequency, representation, behaviours and definition of polysemy. Some of them (Croft, 1998; Briscoe & Copestake, 1995) have paid close attention to the division of the semantic system of polysemous words while some of them (Lakoff, 1987; Tyler & Evans, 2001) are mainly concerned with the semantic extension of some individual words, especially the research into polysemy of prepositions. These studies are helpful for us to understand polysemy. However, the research which systematically studies inner semantic relations of polysemous words is rare in terms of cognitive models.This thesis sets up the theoretical framework of analyzing and interpreting polysemy network based on fundamental theories of cognitive linguistics. The aim of it is to discuss the nature and features of polysemy and to explore the possibility of the construction of polysemy network.From a cognitve view, categorization is a fundamental cognitive process. In the course, people conceptualize the world around us based on prototype theory and on the principle of family resemblance, and then form cognitve categories and concepts. And linguistic structure is a kind of cognitive category which bears prototypicality.Polysemy category, as a kind of linguistic structure, is organized with respect to a primary sense from which the extended meanings are derived via metonymy, metaphor and image schemas. These meanings form an interrelated complex structure by radiation and concatenation. Since all the meanings are related at least one node, and thus they form a polysemy network.Lakoff has made a detailed analysis of ICM and its cognitive models of Bachelor, Lie...