An Empirical Study Of Prototype Theory In English Polysemy Teaching-a Case Study Of Address, Raise, Appreciate

Polysemy, a word with more than one meaning, is a common linguisticphenomenon, which is a product of development of human beings’ life and languages.People can make use of it to recognize the world concisely. Therefore, amongnumerous languages, most basic words emerge in various meanings in different andcultural situations. As to teaching and learning of the foreign language, polysemybecomes a more difficult part. The vocabulary size is required by all kinds of Englishtests. So students pay more attention to the number of words and ignore thecharacteristics of words, such as polysemy. Polysemy cannot be acquired because ofdiversified contexts. New Curriculum Standard of senior middle school requires3500words, including a large number of basic and common words with a high frequency.With the traditional teaching, little emphasis is laid on the central or prototypicalmeaning of polysemy, and teachers still just explain meanings one by one. Studentsare short of a complete knowledge on meanings relation. That is the reason why moststudents memorize words mechanically and inefficiently.The cognitive linguistics, originated at the end of the1970s, did research onthe relationship between human cognition and languages, semantics and culture,which intends to explore cognitive devices on languages. The purpose of cognitivelinguists is to improve the efficiency of learning polysemy from cognitive perspective. Eleanor Rosch, a cognitive psychologist, proposes the prototype theoryin view of a family resemblance of Wittgenstein. The prototype theory holds thatmembers with similar attributes consist of a category and the central members arecalled the prototype. A family resemblance can be found among all the members.Prototypical categories expound grades of membership in place of equalrepresentative. The prototype, a central and prototypical meaning of polysemy,derives and expands peripheral meanings through the two means of metaphor andmetonymy which used to be thought of as figures of speech. The different meaningsof a polysemy are in form of the interrelated and interactional network. There arethree models for extension of meanings: Linear Extension, Radiation andConcatenation. Metonymy is the main pattern of semantic extension for LinearExtension, while metaphor is used for Radiation and Concatenation.The present study chooses100students of Grade1in Datong Huilin MiddleSchool as subjects and employs a questionnaire and a vocabulary test as instruments.ADDRESS, RAISE, APPRECIATE, the typical and high frequent verbs, areexplained systematically with the Prototype Theory. The pretest and posttest data areinput the computer and analyzed by SPSS17.0. An equal English level among allthe subjects is shown through the pretest. Then, after one semester learning,improvement of English level of students of Huilin Middle school can be seenthrough the posttest. The study expects to make a comparison of the new teachingmethod with the traditional method on the polysemy teaching and learning.Accordingly, an effective method can unload heavy burden of vocabulary retention,which arises students’ interest in English learning and improve English proficiency.