A Cognitive Contrastive Study On The Polysemy Of Body-Part Terms

Polysemy is pervasive in language and appears in many forms. It's not only akind of linguistic phenomenon, but an economic and effective means of constuingexperiences into meanings. Among all polysemous phenomena, the polysemy ofhuman body-part terms is the most popular. On one hand, this is due to the fact thatbody-part terms belong to the basic-level category which often cause polysemy; onthe other hand, human beings possess the cognitive principles like "from the near tothe far" and "from the concrete to the abstract", thus, we often "Jin qu zhu shen"(starting from our body or bodily experience) in knowing or construing the world.In the process of the construal, human bodily experience serves as the basis, withcategorization and conceptualization playing the essential role. However, the fact isthat the English and Chinese peoples live in different geographical, social and culturalenvironments. Although they have the same body structure and many similar bodilyexperiences, their cognition or thinking patterns will differ accordingly, presentingmany ethnic-specific characteristics.Taking eye and yan/mu as a case, this study undertakes a bidirectional andcomprehensive analysis of the polysemous English and Chinese body-part terms withthe conception of category, metaphor and metonymy, and purports to reveal thecognitive similarities and differences between the two cultures. The results are: (1) thecognitive mechanisms of their meaning extension are almost the same, i.e., mainly bymeans of metaphor and metonymy, with"metaphor from metonymy"as thepredominant model; (2) (through a Sino-American questionnaire the study proves)their meaning extension has psychological reality; (3) from their prototypical sensesto peripheral ones, the metaphorical and metonymical mappings based on the conceptof EYE/YAN/MU cover six areas; and the cognitive differences are generalized intothree major types: a) mappings closely related to religion and classical cultural modes;b) those connected with living environment and habits; c) those in correlation withobserving perspectives. (4) on body-based conceptual mappings, not only do we havethe metaphorical cognition of MIND AS BODY, but also that of THING AS BODYand SOCIAL RELATION AS BODY.This study has three innovational points: (1) methodologically, this study unitesthe classical introspection method with empirical approaches: a Sino-Americanquestionnaire on the psychological reality of meaning extension and a corpus-basedmethod in specifying and exemplifying lexical senses with natural data. (2)theoretically, the result of the Sino-American questionnaire proves from a perspectivethe psychological reality of meaning extension. (3) this study enriches Sweetser'sMIND AS BODY metaphor, and assumes that not only do we share the MIND ASBODY cognition, but also THING AS BODY and SOCIAL RELATION AS BODYcognitions.