A Comparative Study On Polysemy In Nose In English And Bi In Chinese From A Cognitive Perspective

The ideology of getting inspired by observing the human body and the universe or man being the measure of the universe in Chinese and English tell that human are prone to humanizing the world when interacting with it. As polysemy is a ubiquitous language phenomenon and human body-part terms are the meta-concepts in perceiving the world, a comprehensive analysis on the body-part terms is of great value to unveil the similarities and differences between the English and Chinese in cognitive principle and thinking mode.The nose is an essential organ and plenty of usages can be found in English and Chinese. Grounded in conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and image schema, the thesis has adopted comparative research method to profoundly elaborate the commonalities and disparities of nose meanings in the Chinese Dictionary, the English-Chinese Dictionary and corpora (BNC, CCL). The research questions are as follows:1. How are the senses of nose and bi extended? What are the similarities and differences among their senses? 2. How are nose and bi conceptualized through conceptual metonymy and metaphor? What are the similarities and differences? 3. What contributes to these similarities and differences?The major findings are as follows. Firstly, nose in English and bi in Chinese generally extend from the same prototypical sense through conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy and undergo similar meaning extension process in the pattern of radiation and concatenation. However, they extend diversely in detail. Nose is apt to extend through metonymy while bi tends to extend through metaphor. In addition, senses of nose are more abundant than those of bi, especially the verb senses. Secondly, nose and bi have similarities and differences in metonymic and metaphorical mappings. Both of them tend to be mapped based on the physical characteristics and functions of the nose. In terms of metaphorical mappings, both nose and bi can indicate the protruding object in light of the similar protruding shape. However, bi in Chinese can also be projected by virtue of the features with holes and cavity. And bi is conceptualized as a container as well. Beyond that, while bi is most likely to be mapped to the spatial and temporal domains motivated by Center-Periphery schema and to language domain by Part-Whole schema, nose tends to be projected to the object domain by Front-Back schema. Concerning metonymy, nose/bi can refer to face, person, a sense of smell and emotions. Nose can straightly designate actions by metonymy. But bi is rarely used as a verb in modern Chinese. Through conceptual metaphtonymy, both nose and bi can refer to a special ability. Thirdly, the English and Chinese have similar body structure and embodied experience, which leads to similar meanings between nose and bi. But different cultures have resulted in the differences of word meanings. The major findings of the thesis will benefit the second language learning to some extent.