A Study Of Metaphorical Motivation To Lexical Polysemy

Lexical polysemy is the most important and pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages and has attracted much attention of linguists. People used to explore polysemy in light of traditional view. The two major influential approaches-------structuralism and componential analysis can't completely grasp the essence of polysemous phenomenon. In the Structuralistic approach, polysemy is reduced to an arbitrary, unmotivated and intuitive phenomenon. Componential analysis studies word meanings within the structure of a language unit. This theory shows its own limitations in analyzing the meanings of a polysemous word. Because a polyseme has more than one sense, consequently, a polysemous word has different sets of semantic components. So it would be impossible to decompose all possible word meanings into a manageable, finite set of features. In conclusion, the two traditional approaches fail to reveal the essence of the process of polysemization and to give a satisfactory explanation to the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy.The development of cognitive linguistics provides a more convincing and systematic analysis of polysemy. Some studies have been made on polysemy in cognitive perspective, but they are mainly carried out by the prototype theory. This approach to polysemy is mainly centered on the analysis of concrete words. Systematic and elaborate studies of metaphorical motivation to polysemy are rare. Based on Lakoff & Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the present paper is a study of polysemy mainly from metaphorical perspective. Metaphor is cognitive in nature in that as a basic tool of cognition, it can structure many abstract concepts through mapping concrete concepts onto them. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of things in terms of another. Metaphor is a mapping across two domains: the source domain and the target domain. The cognitive nature and working principles of metaphor provide theoretical foundation for associating metaphor with the language phenomenon: polysemy. Language is the product of human cognition while metaphor is a basic tool of it. So it would be reasonable and feasible to explore polysemy from metaphorical perspective. Specifically, the present paper makes a tentative exploration on polysemy at the aspects of its internal relations between different meanings of a polysemous word, semantic extension process and cross-cultural comparisons.The paper consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction, introducing the purposes and significance of this study. In Part Two, we briefly review relevant concepts of polysemy and the traditional studies of polysemy. In particular, the review focuses on the study of semantics from cognitive point of view and emphasizes that word meaning is extended by way of metaphor. So the relationship between polysemy and metaphor is mainly introduced. Metaphor is not only used in figurative language but also it is a basic tool of thought and cognition. It can generate new meanings through cross-domain mappings and meaning extension is largely motivated by metaphor. So metaphor is very creative in polysemization .At the beginning of Part Three, the evolution model of polysemy is studied. Polysemy through metaphorical extension is the focus of this part. Metonymy, another important cognitive tool in polysemization, is also studied in this part. Besides, the relationship between the two is briefly discussed at the end of this part. Metonymy, like metaphor, conceptual in nature, projects one concept onto another. So basically, metonymy can be classified into the category of metaphor. This kind of relationship between the two and the fact that metaphor is the major drive for polysemization further reinforce the point of view of the paper. In the fourth part, with one of the basic color terms as an example, a contrastive study between metaphorical extension of"红"and"red"is made. The similarities and differences can be explained in terms of similar cognition and cross-cultural differences. The last part serves as the conclusion of the paper. We conclude that traditional approaches have proved to be inadequate to fully account for polysemous phenomena. Instead, polysemy should be studied in cognitive perspective, to be more specific, from the angle of metaphor. A lot of polysemous words are due to metaphorical use. This conclusion amounts to testifying the fact that polysemy is deeply motivated by metaphor and metaphor is the major impetus of sense extension.