A Cognitive Approach To The Extended Uses Of Human-Describing Adjectives

Adjectives have long been regarded as polysemous. This is because adjectives oftenhave various interpretations when they modify different nouns. Although adjectiveshave an important status in human language, relatively little attention has been paid tothem in traditional lexical and semantic studies, compared with the great deal of workdevoted to nouns and verbs. Previous studies mainly focused on syntactic and semanticfeatures. Adjectives have seldom been studied from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics.Among English adjectives, some are originally used to describe human beings andare called human-describing adjectives in this thesis. We usually meet some expressionsabout them, like happy festival, choking river, lonely cypress, sad footprint and so on.We find that the uses of these adjectives have been extended.We call this phenomenonthe extended uses of human-describing adjectives in this thesis. This phenomenon hasnot been given reasonable explanation in the past. This thesis argues that the extendeduses of human-describing adjectives are connected closely with human cognition.Therefore, on the basis of previous studies, the thesis tries to interpret the extended usesof human-describing adjectives from a cognitive perspective.The author first makes a brief review of previous studies of adjectives, polysemy ofadjectives and transferred epithet at home and abroad. The thesis takes Lakoff andJohnson’s embodied philosophy and the conceptual metaphor theory as its theoreticalfoundation. It has introduced embodied philosophy from the aspects of the origin of theconcept of experience, concept of embodied philosophy, embodied philosophy inlanguage and so on. Besides, it has introduced the nature of conceptual metaphor,mapping models of conceptual metaphor as well as ontological metaphor. In the mainpart of this thesis, the basic uses and extended uses of human-describing adjectives areidentified and the conceptual metaphors existing in the extended uses ofhuman-describing adjectives are recognized. Then, the formation mechanism of theextended uses of human-describing adjectives is explored. Last, conventional and nonconvenional collocation of the extended uses of human-describing adjectives isdistinguished. The study indicates that people’s perception of their own body is on thebasis of their perception of the outside world. On the level of language, the adjectiveswhich are originally used to describe human beings are also used describe the outsideworld, so the extended uses of human-describing adjectives have been formed. There isanother new finding in this thesis. When people do not feel the semantic conflictbetween a noun and a human-describing adjective, the extended uses of thehuman-describing adjective are regarded as common expressions. When people can feelthe semantic conflict between a noun and a human-describing adjective, the extendeduses of the human-describing adjective are regarded as transferred epithet. However,there is no obvious boundary between the two phenomena.On the basis of previous studies of adjectives, the author makes a systematic studyof the extended uses of human-state-indicating adjectives, which can be regarded as acomplement of study of adjectives.