A Study Of Polysemy From The Perspective Of Cognitive Context

When words were first created, they were almost monosemic. However, with the advancement of human society, more and more words were required to be endowed with meanings. In order to reduce the burden for people to memorize, a word was endowed with various meanings, which is also a testament that the development of language conforms to the principle of economy and diversity. Polysemy, in a word, means a word has more than one meaning. This thesis will give an explanation of the motivations of polysemy from the perspective of cognitive context.Firstly, in this paper, the notion of "cognitive context" is defined and explained. In terms of cognitive context, from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, it emphasizes man’s cognition of the context. In different contexts, the same word can be illustrated from different viewpoints, thus forming various meanings.Moreover, according to the classifications of cognitive context, phenomena of polysemy will be discussed from the perspective of linguistic cognitive context, situational cognitive context and cultural cognitive context. Besides, specific examples are listed to illustrate the roles of these three cognitive contexts in the explanation of polysemous words.In the end, according to the studies and examples of polysemy from the perspective of cognitive context, we can claim that cognitive context is applicable to help people understand polysemy. Therefore, we can claim that cognitive context is another perspective to study polysemy.