The Study Of Polysemy From Cognitive Semantics

Polysemy is widely used in our daily life. For a long time, many linguists have been making the study of polysemy. With the development of human cognition, people would like to put new meanings into the known words instead of increasing the numbers of words unboundedly. Thus the wish has been fulfilled in which people can cognize the world in an effective way, and it also satisfies the economic principle of using language. This thesis gives us a relatively comprehensive and reasonable interpretation in the light of cognitive semantics. It also gives some inspiration for language learners and teachers as well as dictionary compilers.In this paper, the author makes a brief academic review of polysemy from famous linguists and semanticists’classical theses firstly. Then, based on the definition and source of polysemy, the author discusses the analysis of this phenomenon from the view of traditional semantics. We cannot explore the nature of polysemy, because the traditional linguists focus on the outer structure and the differences of the meanings, for example, how to distinguish polysemy and homonymy (Jackendoff,1985). The development of cognitive semantics helps us break the stereotypes of learning vocabulary, which makes us review the nature of semantics from the view of cognition. The cognitive scholars analyze polysemy on the basis of experientialism and believe that it is an extended process from the center meaning to the derived meaning. (Taylor,2000) Being targeted to focus on the three cognitive semantic theories-Categorization and Prototype Theory, Metaphoric Mechanism and Image Schema Mechanism, the author analyzes the essence of polysemy. In order to make a concrete analysis, the author discusses several cases study ("head", "eye") and makes a detailed explanation to explain polysemous phenomenon. In the end, the author puts forward some implications for words learning, teaching and dictionary compiling as well as some limitations of this paper.There are some findings in this paper:First, polysemy is the result of categorization, which is a cognition of human mind and each sense follows the principle of family resemblance. Second, metaphor mechanism plays an important role in meaning extending. Third, image schema makes a full understanding of spatial and abstract cognition. Fourth, the close integration of the three theories forms the semantic web, which helps us to analyze polysemy effectively.