An Empirical Study Of Semantic Extension Of Body-part Lexemes In English And Chinese: A Cognitive Approach

Polysemy, a universal phenomenon of human language, is unavoidable in the course of evolution and development of vocabulary systems. Scholars home and abroad have researched it from different angles at various levels. Traditional polysemy studies emphasize either the external relation between words and the physical world or the inner relations between senses of a word, ignore the role of humans in word formation and sense extension, and fail to notice the motivation for semantic extension. The emergence and development of Cognitive Linguistics offers a new perspective to study polysemy so that more scientific and convincing explanations have borne. Starting from the relation between human cognition and senses of words, Cognitive Linguistics justifies language as the result of cognitive processing based on interactions between human beings and the external world. In essence, polysemy demonstrates how the basic sense of words, with the help of human cognitive modes, reconceptualizes and recategorizes the world relentlessly, and embodies an interrelated relationship between different senses of the same word forms within or beyond one category. However, current cognitive studies of polysemy tend to focus on case studies, which result in high randomness and low representativeness, and cannot reflect systematic laws of semantic change. The agreement between different word classes becomes one criterion to distinguish polysemy from homonymy, denying the odds of semantic extension across categories. Subjects used in polysemy studies tend to be confined into the single language system, making it hard to discover similarities and differences of semantic extension between languages and seldom exploring causes behind accordingly.Within the integrated cognitive framework, inspections are implemented between different language systems of the common group of typical words clustered into the same semantic field. Comparisons and analyses between various levels bring about convincing conclusions. In this way, cognitive models governing semantic extension are revealed and testified, their specific manifestations in different languages and factors of causing such are made so that human understanding of languages can be deepened and their language performances improved. The body, as the beginning of human cognition, offers rich sources in forming vocabulary. Over a long history body lexemes which have richer experiential connotations and hide greater laws of word evolution, undoubtedly, become ideal representative subjects. Dictionaries, the historical crystal of language development, are tested and accepted by their language communities and therefore enjoy great authoritativeness. Based on common body part lexemes illustrated in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (7th Edition) and Applied Chinese Dictionary, this thesis, within the theoretic framework of cognitive metaphor and metonymy, makes a systematic investigation into them from both lexical and grammatical levels. Since the body part system is furthered into three subtypes, scrutiny is carried out at two different levels, the whole system and its subtypes. It is argued that original senses of polysemous words, with the help of human cognitive mechanisms---metaphor, metonymy and interaction between them, are extended systematically. Such semantic extension occurs at both lexical and grammatical levels, which enlarges original content of the same category and function across categories. In multifunctionality grammaticalization is unavoidable. Cognitive models do not play the unanimous role in the same system from different languages, in its specific subtypes within and between the language systems. Similarities and differences behind come from various sources.The integrated framework from cognitive approach reimburses those of the single theoretical model for polysemy studies, thereby drawing a more comprehensive and objective picture of paths in extending senses and vindicating the semantic extension at the grammatical level. Collected subjects are researched from different angles so that cognitive models exert influences on them as a whole and as components of the whole can be illustrated. Along with further explorations for such similarities and differences the study is of a great help for lexicography in dealing with polysemous lexemes, second language teaching and second language learning of polysemous words.