Sense Demarcation Of Polysemy In English-chinese Learner's Dictionary

Polysemy, present in most languages, belongs to the field of semantics, and the study of polysemy has long been focused on by linguists. Traditional approaches, like structuralism and formalism, argue that polysemy is nothing but a coincidence with arbitrary sense relations and fail to give a principled explanation to its generative motivation and reveal its essence. The development of modern linguistics, by contrast, offers us a new direction to construe polysemy. To cognitive linguists, polysemy is an extending process of basic meanings of a word in compliance with certain cognitive rule, a result of conceptualization. Psycholinguists regard it as a process of mental representation.Sense demarcation, an important premise of sense description, is a generalization of specific meanings of a headword in different contexts, an extraction of the unchanged semantic features contained in those specific meanings. On this view, the perplexing polysemic features of polysemy have made sense discrimination and sense demarcation a big challenge that linguists and lexicographers have been confronting. Many linguists have postulated different demarcation criteria and principles from different points; however, they to great extent have subjective aspects, which have led to extant problems like too many sub-divisions or highly abstract senses, or same senses seen in an entry, etc. In this sense, in contemporary English-Chinese learner's dictionaries, the main task boils down to discern senses in a finer granularity, not too minute or too rough.Due to the different processing models in dictionaries, the thesis first defines polysemy, distinguishes it from homonymy, and interprets its semantic motivation in terms of traditional semantics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics so as to deepen learners' understanding and memory of polysemy. In succession, an introduction to researches on sense demarcation and sense ordering of polysemy is given. Taking the polysemous preposition over as a case study, in order to establish the framework, the thesis compares its cognitive semantic structure using three mainly adopted methodologies:Full-specification, Model of Principled Polysemy and Monosemy. Then in reference to the 15 distinct senses conceived by MPP, it makes an analytical comparison of sense demarcation and sense ordering of over in commonly used English-Chinese learner's dictionaries at present, and on the basis of a summary of their merits and demerits puts forward a tentative modified sense demarcation model for over, which is supposed to better reflect its cognitive semantic structure and give some light to sense demarcation of polysemous prepositions and other classes of polysemous headwords in English-Chinese learner's dictionary.