Markedness Theory In The Teaching Of English Polysemy

Polysemy teaching is a very important component in instruction of thevocabulary of a foreign or second language. In the literature to date there are anumber of approaches to the study of polysemy, but they do not provide an effectiveway to teach polysemous words, though they can be analyzed to explain polysemouswords to some extent. Markedness Theory belongs to Prague School of functionalliguistics and it has been applied into many linguistic fields. The author of this thesisexplains English polysemy with Markedness Theory and considers that the basicmeanings of polysemous words are the unmarked senses and other meanings are themarked senses.Based on the analysis of Markedness Theory in English polysemy, the authorwill probe into the teaching of polysemy to find an effcient approach by an empiricalstudy. Altogether80students who were in the second grade and in the third grade ofWeinan Senior Middle School participated in the present research. The two groups ofstudents took two tests at different stages respectively. The first group of test wastaken in the middle of the semester, and the second group of test were done at the endof the semester. There was a one-to-one interview after each stage to obtainqualitative data. The scores of the four tests were analyzed and such analysis alongwith the interview led to following findings:1) it is difficult for seniormiddle schoolstudents to grasp the polysemous words.2)what causes the problem is that thestudents cannot memorize the marked senses of the polysemous words.3)if themarked senses are given more attention, it will be much easier for students to grasppolysemous words.Based on the above results, the author concludes that great attention should bepaid to the marked senses during teaching, that is, having knowledge of MarkednessTheory is crucial in teaching English polysemy.