A Cognitive Analysis Of Polysemy

Polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon, which for many years has been arresting foreign and domestic researchers' attention. Generally speaking, a word has only a single meaning at its first appearance and with the development of people's needs of recognizing and explaining the world, the problem of shortage of already-existed words arises. And deriving meanings from original words is one economical and convenient way to satisfy people's needs of expression, so vocabulary begins its course of Polysemization. The synchronic coexistence of original meaning and diachronically derived meanings is the case of polysemy.In the thesis, the author firstly makes a brief survey of polysemy including the definitions of polysemy and some relative important concepts. Secondly, a brief theoretical review about the research of polysemy has been done, in which the author points out the shortcomings of the traditional semantic theories while interpreting the polysemous phenomenon. Traditional semantic theories cannot give out satisfactory explanations of polysemy. For the very beginning symbolic triangle theory to modern semantic theories, most of them hold the view that language makes use of sense and reference to mirror the object world and senses are the natural and arbitrary links between symbols and things without any restriction by people's modes of recognizing the world. The author briefly makes out the limitations and shortcomings of semantic feature theory, semantic field theory and truth conditional theory in analyzing polysemy.Then the author brings in the cognitive science theory, and tries to make clear the relationships among language, cognition and the objective world: language is the most important tool by which people can sense the outside world; human language derives from and mirrors the cognitive concepts. Therefore, it has been obvious that the research of polysemy cannot be done without an analysis of human cognitive structure. Then the author introduces some important theories within the cognitive framework: image schemas theory, categorization theory and conceptual metaphor theory, etc.. All these cognitive abilities play important roles in the course of polysemization, and they cannot exist and effect alone but to coexist closely and influence each other. The theories as well as the relationships among them will act as the theoretical basis of the following research.Based upon these cognitive theories discussed above, later a cognitive analysis is carried out from several perspectives of human cognition and a tentative conclusion is put forward: image schema acts as the psychological basis of the course of polysemization and even all the other cognitive activities, which is of great importance in the meaning extension in spatial categories and from spatial categories to abstract categories; and the main tools of the process of polysemization are humans' main cognitive powers: categorization, metonymy and metaphor (from a wider sense, metonymy is part of metaphor), among which metaphor is humans' modes of thinking. Metaphorical modes of thinking are the deep cause of polysemization. Metaphorical mapping occurs based on the shared characteristics between source domain and target domain from the abstract to the concrete. And this mapping is free and blasting. The possible perspective shift during the mapping makes the sense framework more complicated, and polysemes of a word are seemingly unrelated.What's more, the author further studies the guidable significance of the prototype theory and the practical significance of conceptual metaphor theory for EFL teaching and learning.And the author makes case studies of the word head and "花园" as examples, and analyzes the influence of humans' cognitive abilities in its course of polysemization, which proves again the main point of view of this thesis.Finally, in conclusions the author makes a theoretical conclusion of the thesis and firmly points out that image schemas should be regarded as the psychological cognition basis of polysemy; categorization, metonymy and metaphor are cognitive powers of polysemy and people's metaphorical modes of thinking is the deep mechanism of polysemy. Besides, the author has listed some shortcomings and limitations of this research.