A Cognitive Approach To The Semantic Extension Of Body-part Terms In English

Research in semantic extension aims at exploring how and why the change of lexical meaning happens. The complex nature of semantic extension lies in the diversified development of different individuals. Only through group analysis can we reveal the deep rules of semantic extension. Though quite a number of earlier studies of semantic extension with individual words have been done so far, yet these studies are far from holistic and systematic with a summary of development rules and results left uncovered.Human body is the starting point of our cognition to the world. Concepts about body-part terms are meta concept of human cognition. Because of the long process of being used frequently and reflecting the culture-bound psychological model of a particular nation profound, body-part terms divided into different groups, which have got abundant semantic extensions, should be without doubt a valuable target to aim at. Adopting a method of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis from a cognitive perspective, we have chosen 39 daily-used English body-part terms as the study subject. Based on a rather systematic description of body-part terms, this thesis analyzes the rules and mechanisms of semantic extension. Body-part terms in this thesis are classified into three main categories:the terms of the head-part, the terms of the trunk and those of the internal organs. First, we make a rather systematic description of the extended senses of body-part terms from three aspects:the number of extended senses, the category number of extended senses and the content of extended senses. Then, based on the cognitive semantic theories of metaphor and metonymy, we analyze the meaning construction of body-part terms. Finally, from a cross-language perspective, a comparative study of semantic extension between English and Chinese is carried out in order to reveal the universal human thinking and cultural differences of meaning construction. The findings are as follows:1. The number of extended senses of body-part terms decreases successively from the terms of the head-part to the terms of the trunk, then to the terms of the internal organs, which conforms to the number of semantic category hierarchy. The corresponding relationship between the number of extended senses and that of the category forms a gradual corresponding rule:"strong extended power-high category number" and "weak extended power-low category number". Both the number of extended senses and that of the category are determined by frequency differences and the degree of cognitive prominence.2. Lexical meaning is closely related to human cognition of the surrounding world. These prominent features often serve as the genes of meaning extension. Most extended senses of body-part terms are usually derived from highlighting the apparent features such as shape, position and function. However, the three kinds of extensions are not balanced. Among the metaphorical senses from the shapes of body-parts, many are derived from the terms of the head-part, while the terms of the trunk and the terms of the internal organs have more senses from the functions of their corresponding body parts. These differences are mainly determined by the degree of cognitive prominence and the cognitive properties (shape, position, function) of different body parts.3. There are two ways of human thinking in semantic extension: metaphorical thinking based on similarity and metonymic thinking based on contiguity. There are three paths to the semantic extension of body-part terms:(1) Influenced by metaphorical thinking, some category senses of body-part terms are constructed through mappings from the domain of BODY to the NON-HUMAN ENTITY, SPACE, TIME and QUANLITY domains. Bases of the mappings are similarities with the body part in shape and position; (2) Influenced by metonymic thinking, body-parts in BODY domain are taken to indicate people, emotions, functions, or actions concerned; (3) In interaction with metaphor, the extended senses of body-part terms are mainly based on the model: metonymic mappings tend to precede metaphorical mappings; metonymy serves as the basis of metaphor.4. The semantic extensions of body-part terms have much in common in English and Chinese because they reflect universal experiences with our body. Meanwhile, influenced by cultural factors, the content of extended senses of English body-part terms differ from those of Chinese body-part terms to some degree.It is believed that this thesis has, to a certain degree, pave the way for the group analysis of semantic extension. Further more, this research will be helpful to vocabulary teaching in English.