The Metaphor Of The Chinese Early Childhood Mechanism And Development Of Polysemy

The language development of early children is so rapid that in a few years they basically master their mother tone. There are several interpretations for this phenomenon, among which, the "innateness hypothesis" which advocated by N.Chomsky and the "cognitive hypothesis" which advocated by J. Piaget have more influences.We agree with Piaget's cognitive hypothesis in this paper. Relying on our self-built Informative Corpus and combining with the achievement by psycholinguistic scholars, we conduct our study, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. We hold the idea that the development of children's language is constrained by the cognitive ability, and decided by the cognitive development . Here our focus is on the important role of Metaphor mechanism, which, not only affects children's various types of metaphorical expression in language, but also has a major impact on children's acquisition of polysemous words.Compared with adult, children's uses of Metaphor are much less in type and quality. This implies that cognitive developments have important influences on children's metaphorical expression in language, and that children of different social influence show differently. Good language input and language environment play important roles for the cultivation of metaphorical thinking.Metaphors are of great significance for the acquisition of the polysemous words. Observing and studying commonly used terms of the different senses of the acquisition processes, such as cross-category nouns, polysemous verbs, adverbs and so on, we find that meaning andfunctions play important roles in the acquisition process. All of these affect the acquisition of poly-meaning items. Words acquisition follows the course of from the concrete meaning to abstract meaning and from the common meaning to the extended meaning. Metaphor plays the roles of proliferation and activation in that course.In addition, metaphor phenomenon in early children's language also has important theoretical significance. Modern research has proved that Metaphor has psychological basis. Children use the Metaphor mechanism to establish their early psychological thesaurus. Generalization and narrowing in the acquisition process is also closely related with the metaphor.Therefore, we could use children's Metaphor acquisition rules to give them better language education, and consequently achieve better educational results.