An Analysis Of The Cognitive Motivation Of English Polysemy

Polysemy is actually a linguistic phenomenon whereby a single word has many meanings that are systematically related. Generally speaking, words with more than one meaning can all be called polysemy. For decades, it has always been a central concern for a great many linguists and literary men and numerous research has been done, among which the structuralism represented by Saussure really offers us one way of interpreting polysemy. But at the same time,problems also arise.For example, talking of the relationships of multiple meanings of a polysemous word, it is only restricted to the internal structure of language without considering its inner cognitive mechanisms such as the function of the outside world and human experience in developing word meanings. In structural point of view, polysemy is merely a linguistic coincidence, nothing else. It’s quite obvious that we couldn’t account for polysemy satisfactorily by means of structuralism. How on earth could a word develop gradually from only meaning to other meanings? How do various meanings relate to each other? With the development of cognitive linguistics, a new window towards this problem has been opened. According to many cognitive linguists, such as Lakoff, Johnson and Taylor, polysemy is in fact motivated by human cognition; the messy meanings of a polysemous word stem from a central meaning and are closely related to each other by some cognitive mechanism. It is the result of cognitive categorization and conceptualization.The thesis will proceed in the following five parts:part one is the introduction, which presents an account of the background information, the significance and the organization of the research. What’s more, the research questions, aims and methods are also mentioned. Part two is literature review, mainly dealing with the relative literature on the previous study of polysemy and summarizing some merits and demerits of it. Part three is the theoretical framework, a brief introduction to cognitive linguistics as well as some relevant terms which are responsible for explaining polysemy such as categorization, prototype theory, image schema, metonymy and metaphor will be discussed in detail. Part four is the case study, in which how the different meanings of "head" are closely related will be analyzed on the basis of the theories talked about in part three. The last part is the conclusion; both the implication and limitation of the thesis will also be included.