A Comparative Study Of Polysemy Of "?" And "Heart" From A Cognitive Perspective

Cognitive linguistics began to develop quickly in the 1980 s when Lakoff and Johnson's book,Metaphors We Live by,was published.Linguists find a new perspective to explain polysemy,namely,cognitive perspective.Prototype theory and conceptual metaphor and metonymy are applied to explain polysemy.Body-part terms are a popular research topic,especially “?” and “Heart”.Among those studies of “?”and “Heart”,most studies analyze metaphorical and metonymic meanings,and a few studies analyze the meanings from double metonymy and the interaction between conceptual metaphor and metonymy.Therefore,this thesis tries to further study the polysemy of “?” and “Heart” on the theoretical basis of conceptual metaphor and metonymy and their interaction and double metonymy,and explores the cognitive structure.Besides,this study tries to compare the meanings of “?” and “Heart”,find out similarities and differences and explore reasons.It includes the following research questions:(1)What are the polysemous meanings of “ ? ”and “Heart” ? What is the mechanism of meaning production?(2)What are the similarities and differences between meanings of “ ? ” and“Heart”? and why?I collect 1330 examples of“?”from han-yu-da-ci-dian(???????)and740 examples of“Heart”from The Oxford English Dictionary.Besides,I randomly collect the first 200 examples of“?”from CCL-corpus and the first 200 examples of“Heart”from BYU-BNC.After analyzing those examples,I get 10 meanings of“?”and 10 meanings of“Heart”.Among those meanings,5 meanings of“?”and 5meanings of“Heart”have sub-meanings.This study mainly has the following findings.Both “?” and “Heart” are polysemous and they originally refer to the physical organ(heart).They can stand for emotion,mind,chest,person,space,stomach,something in central position,and something important.“?” also stands for central position while “Heart” refers to something in the shape of heart.Those meanings of “ ? ” and “Heart” are produced in four ways,namely,conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy,double metonymy and the interaction between conceptual metaphor and metonymy.Among all the meanings of “?” and“Heart”,metonymic meanings account for the largest percentage,respectivelystanding at 85.48% and 77.78%,while meanings from double metonymy account for the smallest percentage,respectively standing at 1.61% and 2.22%.Metaphorical meanings of “?” and “Heart” respectively account for the percentage of 4.83 % and4.44% of the total,and meanings from the interaction between conceptual metaphor and metonymy respectively account for 6.45% and 13.33%.“?” and “Heart” have similar meanings and ways of meaning production,and the difference mainly lies in some sub-meanings.“?” is more comprehensive than“Heart” in emotional meaning,mental meaning,and spatial meaning.However,“Heart” can express exclamation and inspiration,stand for courageous and poor person,time,the quality of something and life.The embodied feature of cognition and common cognitive ways between Chinese and English people lead to the similarities in meaning and meaning production of “?” and “Heart”.However,the difference in thinking and cultural environment of cognitive subject results in the differences between meanings of “?” and “Heart”.This study is conducive to language learning and teaching,dictionary compiling and further studies of polysemy.First,this study analyzes the ways of meaning production of a polyseme,which helps learners or teachers know more about human's cognition and this is helpful to learn or teach polysemous words in more effective ways.Besides,this study compares English and Chinese and analyzes the reasons for their similarities and differences,which promotes learners or teachers to explore the reasons as well as knowing the language phenomena.Second,when it comes to dictionary compiling,the meanings of a polyseme can be classified according to the ways of meaning production and analyzed in terms of prominent characteristics.Finally,this study analyzes the meaning production of a polyseme in detail,including source domain,target domain,mapping and prominent characteristics,which may be conducive to the further studies of polysemy.