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An Empirical Research On Polysemy Acquisition From The Angle Of Prototype Category Theory

Posted on:2016-02-29Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L P ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2297330464973199Subject:Subject teaching
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
It is known to all that vocabulary plays an essential role in English learning. And polysemy is a quite popular characteristic in language phenomenon. It is an important part of semantics, and the research of polysemy has a long history in literature and also in the philosophy of language knowledge. In fact, polysemy is regarded as a result of human cognition.Polysemy refers to a word that has multiple meanings which related with each other. There are many polysemous words existing in English which becomes a block for the students to learn English well. Therefore, the study of polysemy acquisition becomes one of the most difficult and major points in the process of English teaching and learning.The study of polysemy draws many scholars’ attention and has a very long history. The traditional linguists put emphasis on the structure of vocabulary and ignore the different senses of polysemous words which makes polysemy teaching more difficult. With the development of cognitive linguistics, prototype category theory becomes a top concern in English learning. And the prototype category theory has offered a very helpful means to polysemy acquisition for the learners. Until nowadays, under the help of prototype category theory, a lot of researches concentrate on the expansion of various meanings of polysemous words. On the contrary, few studies have attempted to explore the polysemy acquisition of students in middle school in an empirical way.Therefore, in this paper, an empirical study is conducted to 90 students of two natural classes in a local middle school. One of the class is selected as the experimental class in random and the other class is as the controlled one. And the prototype category theory is applied in polysemy teaching in the experimental class while the traditional method is still conducted in the controlled class. And the three polysemous words in the pre-test and post-test are selected from their English book. After two months’ empirical study, all the data collected from the pre-polysemy tests and post-polysemy tests are analyzed with the help of Excel and SPSS.In conclusion, the purpose of this study is to explore the effective way to learn English polysemy knowledge with the help of prototype category theory. And it will make an empirical exploration to find out how the middle school students acquire the polysemous words through their study. In addition, the study will also give some useful suggestions for the students to stimulate their interest in polysemy learning and also some vocabulary teaching enlightenment for the teachers to make their teaching more efficient and interesting.Additionally, the result of the experimental study is that the prototype category theory does exert an active influence on polysemy teaching and learning. And the prototype category theory is applied to help learners change their learning process from rote memorization to flexible learning method.
Keywords/Search Tags:polysemy, acquisition, prototype category theory, local middle school
PDF Full Text Request
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