| In the study of cognitive semantics, polysemy has always been a heated topic discussed by linguists. Many linguists have employed image schema theory and metaphor theory to explain polysemy from the cognitive perspective. Image schemas which are abstract experiential representations are essential to the concept construction. Conceptual metaphor is a systematic mapping of a concrete category onto an abstract category by which we can understand the abstract concepts. Image schemas and metaphor, as two different cognitive models, can provide cognitive foundation for polysemy. Based on this, Tyler and Evans proposed the Principled Polysemy Model, pointing out that prepositions have primary sense and distinct senses. The distinct senses are derived from the primary sense based on metaphor and image schemas.Quite a few number of scholars have used such theories to make a research on the polysemy of nouns and prepositions, but the study on the polysemy of verbs is relatively few. The reason for this is that verbs, which are often combined with prepositions, have more complicated meaning structures. Furthermore, the meanings of verbs are characterized by instability. In particular, the motion verbs are the most active ones among verbs and their senses are closely related to the context. Therefore, with the purpose of better understanding on the relationship between the senses of motion verbs, the present research tries to take the motion verb go as a case and then employ Tyler and Evans’Principled Polysemy Model to analyze the senses of go based on metaphor and image schemas theory from the cognitive perspective.In this research, all senses of go are collected from Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary(OALD), and the data are extracted from British National Corpus (BNC). By on-line search, it is found that there are more than87000sentences with go in BNC. Among them,1000sentences are selected randomly by the computer. However,141sentences are excluded because they are short of context or appear several times or exist in the form of noun. Consequently, there are no more than859samples which are regarded as the valid data. According to the context offered by the sentences, the meaning of go in each sentence is classified to one kind of the24higher-lever meanings listed in Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary. Then based on the data statistics, a prototypical sense is found out from the24senses, and the other meanings are divided into six domains including spatial domain, temporal domain, state domain, event domain, quantity domain and sound domain. Finally, the data extracted from BNC are used to make an analysis of the relationship between the prototypical sense and the senses of each domain. At the same time, the diagram of the meanings of go is drawn. Thus, the study comes to a conclusion that motion verbs have their core meaning and the extensive meanings. To a certain degree, there is a certain relation between them. The prototypical sense can extend to the other meanings by the two cognitive models such as metaphor and image schemas.The present research on the polysemy of motion verbs makes a little contribution to the semantic study. It does not only help teachers and students with the vocabulary teaching and learning, but it also has influence on the compilation of dictionary. |
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