Cognitive Lexicology:a New Horizon On English Lexicology

Words are important to language because to most people, when talking about language, the first impression is that it consists of words. Words to languages are just like bricks to buildings. Words have attracted the scholars’ interest for such a long time and the studies on words can date back to thousands of years ago. In historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, functionalist semantics and generative semantics, there are studies on lexicon from different perspectives and each school summarizes their own theories on lexicon such as Componential Analysis, Semantic Field Theory, etc. But all these theories have deficiencies and none of them is accepted by all the scholars.In order to overcome the deficiencies existing in the former studies on lexical phenomena, this thesis tries to study lexicon from a new perspective, cognitive lexicology, which is based on the latest theories and achievements of cognitive linguistics. The author analyzes the lexical phenomena from the perspective of human beings’cognition and embodiment. The author tries to give the lexical phenomena a satisfying interpretation based on the theories of cognitive lexicology, such as prototype theory, image schema, idealized cognitive model (ICM) and event-domain cognitive model (ECM), conceptual blending theory, metaphor and metonymy, etc., to convince readers of its vitality.In doing these analyses mentioned above, the author finds out that cognitive lexicology has its practical applicability. The author also summarizes its enlightenment in lexicon learning. Through this thesis, the readers would gain a general impression of the new branch, i.e. cognitive lexicology and know its powerful vitality in interpreting lexical phenomena. They could also derive inspiration from the enlightenment for remembering words themselves.Generally speaking, through this thesis, the author explains the theoretical framework of cognitive lexicology, its main views, main research methods and main research topics, and gives some enlightenment to English vocabulary learning, through which the readers can have an idea that cognitive lexicology has great vitality.