| Currently, polysemy has become an ordinary and familiar phenomenon existing inlanguage of human beings, which is engendered by the gradual development of languages aswell as life of mankind. As a special type of polysemy, the case of synaesthetic polysemicvocabulary is also the same. Synaesthesia or synaesthetic metaphor, just as the name implies,means that the five basic sensory organs of human beings are related and transferable witheach other. At the beginning, it was considered as a usual physiological or mentalphenomenon and then is treated as a phenomenon of language by linguists by degrees. Inaddition, polysemic words whose cognitive basis is synaesthetia are predominantly thought ofas synaesthetic polysemic words. A lot of synaesthetic polysemic vocabulary exists in alllanguages of humans, and different targets and contexts will lead to different meaning items.Because of all these characteristics, synaesthetic polysemic vocabulary is always viewed asthe vital and difficult point for language teaching and learning. However, as for theacquisition of such kind of words, under the negative influence of the traditional teachingmethod, teachers always demand learners to recite all related meaning items mechanically.Actually, this method is not only rather time–consuming but also will make the Englishlearning become boring step by step. Theoretically speaking, these various meaning items ofcertain synaesthetic polysemic word are interrelated and orderly.Cognitive linguistics, as a branch of the linguistics, was set up by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Langacker in the late1970s and gains much attention and concernfrom more and more researchers with the development of language. The synaesthesia,a special metaphor, occupies a role with crucial importance in the cognitive linguistics,which provides an efficient solution to the problem on the acquisition of synaestheticpolysemic vocabulary during English teaching and learning. Distinguished andknowledgeable scholars, Williams and Ullmann, employed useful schema within theirresearches to offer a thorough illustration on synaesthetia and the meaning extensionof synaesthetic polysemic words respectively. They pointed out that the meaningextension of this kind of words is closely connected with the transmission of sensoryorgans of human beings, meanwhile maintains their own order and rule of meaningextension of synaesthetic polysemic vocabulary.In this empirical experiment, the author selects79students who are freshmen in theschool of City and Environmental Science in Shanxi Normal University as subjects andadopts a survey, two vocabulary tests and a questionnaire as research instruments. Thisresearch intends to explore whether learners can master and apply synaesthetic polysemicwords after being introduced and trained with the synaesthetic metaphor and cognitivemotivation on the connection of various related meaning items. Specifically speaking, in theprocess of this teaching experiment, HORRIBLE, PIRCING and ROUGH, which are typicaland highly frequently–used words, are interpreted with the synaesthetic metaphor in asystematical way in the experimental class, while the traditional teaching method is adoptedin the control group. In addition, the total teaching experiment lasts for a whole semester. Thedata of the test for short–term acquisition and the one for long–term acquisition are typedinto the computer and then analyzed and compared via SPSS17.0. The results manifest that a)subjects in the experimental class can acquire and use target words better than those incontrol group during both of these two vocabulary tests; b) for the experimental group, thereis no significant differences between the test for short–term acquisition and the one for long–term acquisition. |
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