The Cognitive Mechanisms Of Polysemy

As an important linguistic phenomenon, polysemy is pervasive in almost all languages, and the phenomenon of polysemy has attracted much attention of philosophers and linguists in different schools. In the past, this linguistic phenomenon was studied from the semantic and pragmatic perspectives. However, cognitive linguistic has been trying to analyze polysemy by cognitive theories in resent years.In this thesis, the author first gives a definition to polysemy and a brief theoretical review about the traditional semantic and pragmatic studies which have been done on polysemy; then the author points out that these theories fail to define the phenomenon of polysemy, give the essential cause, and adequately explain the relationship between the meanings. Then an introduction of some important cognitive theories is provided by the author, including categorization and prototype theory, conceptual metaphor theory and image schema theory, as well as conceptual blending theory. And these theories are served as the framework to analyze polysemy by examples from several aspects, attempting to carry out a satisfying explanation to this phenomenon. To achieve a clear and vivid explanation, the author carries out a complete and comprehensive case study by employing the typical polyseme "fire" from Chinese Grand Dictionary as its linguistic data. Finally, on the basis of the previous analysis, the author gives some implications on the vocabulary learning and teaching, and dictionary compiling as well. Moreover, the limitations of the thesis are pointed out.The findings of thesis are as followings. First, as a cognitive phenomenon, polysemy is the result of human categorization and conceptualization. The meanings of a polysemic word compose a category in which the meanings distribute around a prototype and share family resemblance. Then, metonymy and metaphor are two main important cognitive mechanisms for meaning extension in polysemization. Moreover, Image schemas play a fundamental role in meaning extension in spatial categories and from spatial categories to abstract categories. Last but not least, conceptual blending is also an effective approach to analyze polysemy.All in all, this thesis gives a relatively comprehensive and reasonable interpretation for polysemy from the cognitive perspective. It also gives some inspiration for language learners and teachers as well as dictionary compilers.