| Vocabulary occupies a vital position in language learning. The meaningscontained within the words are the core part in vocabulary. Polysemy is a commonphenomenon in the vocabulary, so the study of polysemy is of great significance inlexical studies. Polysemy is also a common phenomenon in human language in whicha majority of words are polysemous, while only a small number of words have singlemeaning. The so-called polysemy refers to a single linguistic form with two or moremeanings; in short, it means the old words taking on new meanings. In the course ofhuman being’s cognition of the world, people gradually find that the original existingwords couldn’t meet the need in interpreting the external objective world, so theyprovide the same word with more meanings in order to meet the needs of expression.The vocabulary’s original meaning and their derived meanings co-exist in synchronicperiod of time, and then the polysemy occurs. Therefore, we can see that thephenomenon of polysemy is not only a simple linguistic phenomenon, but it alsoreflects the human’s cognitive rules as well as the results of understanding the world.Polysemy is economical and convenient in delivering more effective information. ForEnglish learners, the emergence of numerous polysemous words reduces the increaseof total vocabulary, which can lessen the load of their vocabulary memorizing. Atpresent, the research on polysemy has attracted attention from both domestic andforeign linguists, philosophers and even writers. What is the nature of polysemy?What’s the connection between the original meaning and the derived meanings of aword? What kind of implications does the cognitive analysis of polysemy have forcollege English vocabulary teaching? Over the years, many linguists have raised theirdifferent views, yet there has been no agreed account so far.The traditional researches on polysemy phenomenon consist of the followingaspects:First, the American modern linguists Foder and Katz have inherited thetraditional semantics, developed and cultivated the semiotic triangle theory and tried to explain the relationship between language structure and its meaning in humanlanguage through the way of semantic componential analysis. However, this semanticcomponential analysis aims at studying the single word’s meaning components and ittends to reveal the internal relations between different elements of a word. While thederivative meanings of a polysemy are not the research objects in semantics, thus thecomponential analysis can not provide sufficient motivations and reasons for thepolysemy phenomenon.Second, the structural linguists Lyons and Cruse have done extensive researchinto polysemy phenomenon. Saussure’s linguistic semiotic theory argues thatlanguage is a semiotic system in which the signifier and the signified constitute atwo-sided psychological entity. Here, the signifier and the signified are arbitrary toeach other. That is to say that the language form and its signified external entity shareno natural relationship. And there is no direct link between the sound of words andmeaning of words. However, polysemy arises in the process of human’sunderstanding the world, and the new meaning is developed from the originalmeaning or already existing meanings. Therefore, the derivative meanings of wordsare closely related to the human perception and cognition toward the outside world aswell as the human interactive activities with the world. Although, the structurallinguists have done a series of analysis on the connection between different meaningitems within polysemy in a synchronic level, they fail to explain and interpret theproductive mechanism within the polysemy in a diachronic level. It has ignored thefact that the derivative meanings of vocabulary are closely related to the developmentof human cognition. And it doesn’t reveal the function played by metaphoricalthinking in the process of polysemy.Thus, the domestic and international researches on the elaboration of polysemyhave developed in a diachronic way. From the traditional linguistics perspective, theexploration and study of the issue of polysemy has paid more attention to the externalcauses for polysemy and the relationship between polysemy and homographs, but itdoesn’t grasp the nature and the whole of polysemous process. As a matter of fact, theresearch on polysemy is not limited to the semantics and pragmatics only, but it has also received great attention from cognitive linguistics.Being established in the1980s, cognitive linguistics takes language as a kind ofhuman being’s cognitive activity and it aims at studying the internal relations andrules between language form and its meanings in light of human cognition. Cognitivelinguistics utilizes the approach of perception and conceptualization on the worldbased on human’s experience of the external world to study language. Cognitivelinguists argue that the polysemy phenomenon is the result of the derivation from aword’s original meaning or core meaning through human cognitive model, such asmetaphor, metonymy, and so on. And the polysemy phenomenon has reflected theprocess of human’s perception and categorization. Absorbing both the view of thefamily resemblance in philosophy and the psychological structure of categorization,the cognitive linguistics proposes that the lexical concepts are not defined by a set ofstandard features, but it is a category defined by the interrelated semantic andconceptual information through family resemblance. In this category, a concept orsemantic information is more prominent and typical than the left. The cognitivelinguists, such as Lakoff, Johnson and Langacker, have explored and studied thecognitive processes and mental space structure in the meaning formation of polysemy.Lakoff and Johnson (1999) pointed out that the formation of polysemy and theinterrelations within different meaning items could be better explained by combiningthe prototype theory, metaphor, and metonymy as well as image schemas. Langacker(2000) stated that A word can represent a complex category which contains not onlyone meaning, but a number of related meanings which can form a network throughlinking by the categorization. One polysemy can be seen as a category whichcontains both core sense and marginal senses. Besides, some domestic scholars suchas Zhao Yanfang and Wang Dechun, they have also done some cognitive researcheson polysemy. Wang Dechun’s research focuses on the division of polysemy system inhis book Multi-angle Language.According to the results of previous study, this thesis analyzes and states theformation mechanism and structure of the polysemy phenomenon in College Englishfrom the perspective of cognitive linguistics on the basis of the prototype theory of categorization; it points out that the meanings of the polysemous words are derived onthe basis of their original meaning through human cognition models which includemetaphor, metonymy and image schemas as well as association. The selectedvocabulary categories in the thesis include the body nouns, motion verbs and actionverbs, the prepositions of locality, and the color adjectives. Each category containstwo or more typical words which are treated as the objects of research and study.The linguistics theory mainly used in this thesis is the categorization theorywhose core is the prototype theory, and each category has its prototype. The scholarYang Zhong has stated that The prototype theory reveals both the concentric featureand the eccentric feature (Yang Zhong&Zhang Shaojie,1998). The two featuresconstrain each other in the process of polysemization. The concentric feature ensuresthe continuity and the motivation of the lexical meaning extension and the eccentricfeature offers the possibility of the lexical meaning extension. The polysemization isrealized by means of the derivation of non-prototypical members and the prototypesplits. The thesis mainly analyzes the typical meaning and the derivative meanings ofseveral categories of the typical and frequently used polysemous words in CollegeEnglish and then reveals that the evidence of the derivation of polysemous words isthe human’s cognitive models which include metaphor and metonymy. They are twodifferent cognitive models in that the metonymy reflects the correlation of the twoelements in the same cognitive field on the basis of the contiguity rule, while themetaphor refers to two different cognitive fields concerning the mapping from thesource domain to the target domain on the basis of the resemblance rule. The sourcedomain is the basis in understanding the target domain. However, the motivation ofthe mapping which can be reflected through the analogy, iconicity relations or theneighboring relations has some certain rules. It is based on the human’s commoncognitive ability that the meanings of vocabulary extended through metonymy andmetaphor. Besides, the thesis also applies the image schema conversion thoughts andthe association model to analyze the motivations between those different meaningswithin one polysemy in analyzing different categories. Through a systematic analysis,we conclude that the relations between different meanings of one polysemous word are not arbitrary, and behind it there are some certain motivations like metaphor,metonymy and image schema etc. The polysemization process is realized throughthese cognitive models of human being.Above all, under the impact of the cognitive model, the original meaning of thepolysemous words gradually forms numerous derivative meanings, with the familyresemblance as the principle and with human’s metonymy and metaphor thinking asits motivation. The theoretical framework has powerful explanation for themicroscopic semantic system of the polysemous words. The research of the paper alsohas important implication effect for the vocabulary teaching in College English. |
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