Cognitive Analysis Of English Polysemous Words

Polysemy is an important and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, and also a peculiarity of human speech. Our language would be chaotic and uneconomic if every word had only one meaning. Many studies have been conducted on the analysis of polysemy, for example, polysemes have been analyzed in terms of semantic features and semantic field etc. However, in the structural approach the research on the relationship of different senses of a polysemous word are confined to the internal structure of language without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanism, ignoring the external elements of language, such as human cognitive devices, his experience in the world, and so on, and come to a conclusion that polysemy is nothing but linguistic coincidence. Therefore, the traditional researches haven't revealed all the facts of polysemy or grasped the essence of it and can't explain the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy completely and convincingly.The development of cognitive science helps us break through the fence of structuralism and explain the motivation for the multiplicity of meanings of a polysemous word from the external world—from the human subjective interaction with the objective world. Based on experientialism and combined with modern cognitive theories, the thesis makes a tentative study on polysemous words. And comes to a conclusion that polysemy is the process of the extension to the other senses from the core or basic sense by the means of cognitive devices, such as metonymy, metaphor and the image schema, and the result of human cognitive categorization and conceptualization.Globally, the paper is divided into six parts. The first is a brief introduction of the paper wherein the purpose and significance of the thesis is situated. Chapter One is expected to primarily define what is polysemy and then review the researches on polysemy in the traditional approach. Besides, shortcomings of the traditional approach to lexical analysis are pointed out. Chapter Two presents in detail the cognitive theories which are employed to explain polysemy. Chapter Three makes up the main body of the thesis, and discusses and analyzes in detail the essence and features of meanings of polysemous words including body nouns, spatial words, verbs and emotional words, which come from the basic vocabulary. Thereafter come the implications of the research to EFL teaching and dictionary compiling. The last part of the thesis is a conclusion.