A Cognitive Approach To Polysemy

The English word eye has other collocations apart from its original meaning of visual perception or organ of sight. However, the meanings of eye in these collocations are no longer in the domain of physical perception, but mapped onto some other abstract domains. People often turn a blind eye to the metaphoricity of these conventional collocations, as they are a part of everyday language. This thesis intends to arouse people's awareness of the metaphorical collocations of eye and the conceptual metaphors underlying these expressions.Known as father of collocation study, Firth points out that the concept of meaning by collocation allows for the polysemous nature of words, which are disambiguated through the process of the collocation(Firth 1968a: 179). Based on Firth's collocation theory and theory of metaphor, this thesis adopts a combination of qualitative analysis and descriptive method to analyze the metaphorical collocation of eye by cognitive way. The Collins COBULID Corpus was used as the tool of collecting the examples of eye in this thesis.The author of this thesis first searches and identifies the different meanings of eye by the company it keeps, then according to the experientialism and vision theories, designs a standard to distinguish the metaphorical collocations of eye from the literal ones. Conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson in their landmark work Metaphors We Live By (1980) is used to analyze these metaphorical collocations, and find out the underlying mapping models of conceptual metaphor and their features. This analysis provides a good explanation as to how eye acquires so many meanings apart from its original meaning of organ of sight, that is, to confirm the internal reason of the semantic extension come from the language users'cognitive thinking. Meanwhile, from this analysis, it is clear that metaphorical extension is a major motivation of polysemy. The arbitrariness claimed by structuralism exists between word form and word meaning, while the relationship between the original and extended meanings of a polysemous word is motivated. The fact that eye whose original meaning is physical perception is used to express other abstract meanings not only proves that metaphor is based on bodily experience, but also shows that metaphor is an important cognitive tool which enables human beings to conceptualize and talk about abstract or unfamiliar concepts by using concrete or familiar ones.