A Conitive Study Of English And Chinese Word Meaning Extension Mechanism

Polysemy is a general phenomenon found in almost all the languages in theworld. However, it is not only a social phenomenon, but also is an effective andeconomic way for people to recognize new things. Language changes constantly,while word is the most sensitive factor that can reflect the changes that a language hasundergone. As a matter of fact, a word usually had only one meaning when it was firstused. Most words begin as specific names for things and only have one meaning. Withthe development of society, new things arise continuously, so it is impossible forevery new thing to have its own specific word to refer to. Instead, using the alreadyexisting words to refer to the new things is an effective and economic way for humancommunication. So people usually associate two or more meanings with one lexicalitem because these meanings appear to be related in some way. Thus many wordshave got their meanings extended.The phenomenon of polysemy has drawn many linguists’ attention. This thesisreviews briefly the traditional researches to polysemy and their defects. Traditionallinguists study the polysemy mainly from the synchronic and diachronic perspective.The representative one is Saussure. Although Saussure proposes two approaches tothe study of language: synchronic approach and diachronic approach, and makes athorough comparison between them, he himself insists that the synchronic point ofview takes precedence over the diachronic one. According to Saussre’s theory of sign,lexical items are the combination of word form and word meaning, while the relationbetween word form and word meaning is arbitrary. Saussre seemed to put muchemphasis on the interior of language system but neglect the process of humanlanguage acquisition. As the development of linguistics, cognitive linguistics putforward a new perspective for studying polysemy. This thesis makes a contrastiveanalysis between English and Chinese polysemy from cognitive perspective, basingon the prototype theory, metaphor and metonymy theory.According to the prototype theory, a lexical item represents a semantic categorywhich does not have just one meaning, but is a category of related meanings. Withinthe category, there is a basic meaning which is considered as the prototypical meaningand many fringe meanings which are derived from the prototypical meaning. All themeanings together form a category by different degrees of family resemblance. Thisthesis mentioned two main meaning extension mechanisms: conceptual metaphor andmetonymy whose working mechanism is mapping. Metaphor involves the comparisonof two concepts in that one is construed in terms of the other. It is often described interms of a target domain and a source domain. The target domain is the experiencebeing described by the metaphor and the source domain is the means that we use in order to describe the experience. Metonymy is defined as a cognitive process in whichthe vehicle provides mental access to the target within the same domain. As humanthinking basic mode, metaphor and metonymy are two important means of meaningextension.Based on the case study of English word Head and Chinese character Tou, thethesis makes a cognitive contrastive study of the ways of meaning extension and therelationship between different meaning entries, tries to find out the similarities anddifferences between English and Chinese languages and explains the reasons for it.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. Chapter one is the introduction part; itbriefly introduces the research background, the research questions, the purpose andthe significance of the research as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter twois the literature review part; it reviews the traditional approaches to polysemy andpoints out their defects. Chapter three is the theoretical framework part; it states thetheories adopted in the research, such as the prototypical theory, the metaphor andmetonymy theory. Chapter four is the research methodology part; it introduces themethod adopted in this research. Chapter five is a case study part; First, it summarizesthe commonly used entries of English word Head in dictionaries, and analyzes theways of their meaning extension; second, it summarizes the commonly used entries ofChinese character Tou in dictionaries, and analyzes the ways of their meaningextension; then, makes a contrastive study between these two languages, and alsofinds out the similarities and differences and explains the reasons for it. Chapter six isthe conclusion of the whole thesis; it summarizes the main findings and points out thedefects of this thesis.