An Empirical Research On Polysemy Acquisition For Non English Majors From The Perspective Of Prototype Category Theory

Polysemy is a common phenomenon in language and takes up the majority part of thelexical pool. Words with high frequency in daily interaction are less likely to bemonosemic. Hence, it has been the focus of linguists throughout the history. Prototypecategory theory is originated from Aristotle’s Classical Theory that met challenges in themid of last century. Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed family resemblance theory to developthe former one. Rosch and other scholars put forward prototype category theory on thebasis of family resemblance in1980s. It is Blugman and Lakoff who first introduced thistheory to study polysemy and has brought to far reaching influence in the field of cognitivelinguistics. Besides, in reference with the prototype category theory, meaning extensionmechanism namely metaphor and metonymy is introduced to explore the motivationunderlying the different meanings of polysemous words. This paper aims at learningefficiency of polysemous words of non-English majors at college level in terms ofprototype category theory. There are two research questions:(1) Is the experimentalvocabulary teaching model which is based on prototype theory more effective than thetraditional vocabulary teaching model as to polysemous words teaching?(2) Which of thetwo models i.e. the experimental vocabulary teaching model which is based on prototypetheory or the traditional vocabulary teaching model, is more effective in students’acquisition of different meanings of a polysemous word? Fourteen weeks of teachingexperiment is designed to testify the possibility and feasibility of the prototype categorytheory in polysemous words teaching among two groups of students. Research data showthat the experimental teaching model is better than the traditional one, especially on thesystematic acquisition of the different meanings of one polysemous word. Thus, it verifiesthe research hypothesis that it is possible and feasible to employ the theory to teachpolysemous words at college.