A Cognitive Study On The Motivation Of Polysemy

Polysemy is a very common phenomenon in almost all languages. It belongs to the field of semantics and the study of polysemy has long been focused on by scholars of linguistics, literature and philosophy. Generally speaking, a word has only a single meaning when it first appears. However, with the development of people's needs to recognize and explain the world, the existing words can not satisfy people's needs of expression. Adding new meanings to the original one is one economical way, so vocabulary gradually changes from monosemic to polysemic. The synchronic coexistence of original meanings and diachronical development of new meaning give rise to polysemy.The traditional approach-structuralism, especially Saussure's theory of arbitrariness, is the influential school of linguistic study. Many studies have been conducted to analyze polysemy, for example, they find out two processes of polysemization: radiation and concatenation, and polysemy is differentiated from homonymy, and polysemes have been analyzed in terms of semantic field and semantic features, etc. However, while researching into the relationship of different senses of a polysemous word, they mainly concern internal structure of language without taking account of its underlying cognitive mechanisms, ignoring the external elements of language such as human cognitive devices and his experience in the world etc, and come to a conclusion that polysemy is nothing but a linguistic coincidence. As a result, the traditional researches fail to reveal the essence of polysemy and make a reasonable explanation to the motivation of polysemy, thus unable to give a satisfactory explanation of the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy. Is the relationship between the different senses of a polysemous word truly and only arbitrary? The development of cognitive science, which provides a more convincing and systematic interpretation of polysemy from the external world, offers us a new direction in the analysis of polysemy. Different from the traditional linguistics, we can make a research on polysemy by inquiry into the relationship between language and the world. That's to say, there is evidence for the motivation of polysemy. Cognitive linguists like Taylor, Lakoff have offered a more thorough and systematic way of analyzing polysemy. They assert that a word meaning is an open system which is subject to change and evolution. Polysemy is the process of the extension of the basic meaning of a word under the influence of cognition. It is the result of cognitive categorization.This thesis is to analyse polysemy from the cognitive perspective to answer two questions: 1. What's the mechanism of polysemy? 2. Is the relationship between the different meanings of a polysemous word arbitrary or motivated? This thesis is mainly based on the established theories in cognitive linguistics and then constructs the theoretical framework for lexical polysemy in order to analyze and explain this phenomenon. Besides, under the guidance of this theoretical framework, we carry on a systematic discussion of several different polysemous words to explore the nature and features of lexical polysemy. We conclude that polysemy is the result of the extension of the core or basic meaning by means of image schema, metaphor and metonymy, thus forming a meaning chain with the prototypical meaning standing in the center. This further reinforces that the relationship between different meanings of a polysemous word is well motivated rather than what is originally believed. Arbitrariness is not the only characteristic of language sign, and motivation is a complement to Saussure's theory of arbitrariness to some extent.The present study not only provides a relatively powerful explanation of the motivation of polysemy, but also has guiding significance in terms of vocabulary teaching, dictionary compiling and textbook designing.