A Comparative Study Of The Polysemization Of English And Chinese Human-body-part Terms From The Cognitive Perspective

Polysemy is a ubiquitous phenomenon in all languages, which has attracted numerous linguists’ interest. For the meaning of a word, Saussure(1980) claims that the relation between the linguistic form and its meaning is arbitrary, which means there is no logic relation between the form and the meaning. Nonetheless, the relation between various meanings of a polysemy is motivated. Based on the existence of motivation between various meanings of a polysemy, the author takes the English and Chinese Human-body-part term "Shou" and "hand" as examples and analyzes and elaborates the polysemous phenomenon of the polysemy, attempting to find out the relation between the prototypical meanings of "Shou" and its extensional meanings and between "hand" and its extensional meanings as well, besides that, the author tries to explain the extensional mechanism in light of the cognitive linguistics.First of all, the definition of the polysemy is given and a comparison between the polysemy and homonymy is demonstrated. Then, the structural methods towards polysemy and their weakness in explaining the polysemous phenomenon has been illustrated, for instance, the structural methods towards polysemy can not explain the relationship between the multiple meanings of a polysemy. Then, the author elaborates some important cognitive linguistic theories, including prototype theory, image schema, metaphor and metonymy. Furthermore, the author uses those theories as the framework to analyze the polysemous phenomenon of "Shou" and "hand". For Chinese word "Shou", the original meaning "the part of arm which could hold things" is the prototypical meaning, the various other meanings of "Shou" are derived from the prototypical meaning through metaphorical, metonymical and metaphorical-metonymical extensions. The English word "hand" is dealt with the same way. In the process, the corpora of "Shou" are collected from Xian Dai Han Yu Da Ci Dian, Xian Dai Han Yu Ci Dian and Peking University Chinese Corpus and so on. The corpora of "hand" are derived from Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, Cambridge International English Dictionary and British National Corpus and etc. Finally, the author compares the meanings of "Shou" and "hand" and tries to explain the similarities and distinctions between them from the perspective of human cognitive ability and Chinese and western cultures.The research findings of this paper lie in the following three aspects. Firstly, the extensional meanings of "shou " and "hand" exist similarities and differences and the author found out and demonstrated them. Secondly, the author made an attempt to find out the reasons behind those similarities and differences. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the similar derived meanings of "shou" and "hand" are due to human’s similar cognitive ability and cognitive method. To be specific, in the process of the polysemization of human-body-part terms, image schema functions as the cognitive foundation, human beings use the metaphor and metonymy to extend the meaning through the image schema, realizing the meaning extension from the prototypical meaning to its derived meanings. The conceptual metonymy based on the contiguity constitutes the foundation mechanism of the meaning extension and the conceptual metaphor based on the similarity provides unlimited possibilities of the derived meanings. While the differences between the "shou" and "hand" are caused by cultural, custom and people’s characteristic’s difference between the east and the west. Finally, the author made a quantitative analysis, concluding that the Chinese "Shou" and English "hand " both take function as the "salient feature" in the meaning extension.To sum it up, the paper makes a comprehensive and complete analysis of the polysemous phenomenon of "Shou " and "hand" through the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the research findings could be used in the fields such as:the analysis of other human-body-part terms; the study and the teaching of the Chinese and English vocabulary; the editing of Chinese-English dictionaries.