A Cognitive Contrastive Study On Polyseme "Head" In English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Prototype Theory

As a pervasive phenomenon in all human languages, polysemy has attracted much attention of many a linguist in different schools. The traditional linguists lay emphasis on the study of the inner-structure of languages, ignoring the correlations among languages, human cognition and the real world, so they fail to give a better explanation to polysemy. The appearance of cognitive linguistics in late 1970s provides a new perspective for the analysis of polysemy. On the basis of experientialism, cognitive linguists highlight the important role of human beings in the process of polysemization, better accounting for the relationships among the diverse senses of a poly seme and the cognitive mechanism hiding behind polysemy, which is extremely persuasive.Regarding the polyseme "head" in English and Chinese as the research object,and many kinds of authoritative dictionaries as research corpus, the , on the theoretical basis of prototype theory, employs qualitative and quantitative research method, contrastive method as well as description and explanation method to analyze deeply the various senses of "head" and "tou" by means of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, classifying them into distinct groups. Then the author, in this , compares and contrasts the similarities as well as disparities in the sense extension of "head" and "tou" and makes an analysis of the factors contributing to such a phenomenon.The research findings of the thesis are demonstrated as follows. Firstly, polysemy is not only the result of economical principle of languages, but also the product of human categorization and conceptualization. A polyseme is considered as a prototype category, in which the distinct senses are related to each other by family resemblances. In the prototype category"head", the distinct senses are in hierarchical relations. The most original and typical meaning is regarded as the prototypical meaning,from which other marginal senses are extended through metaphor and metonymy. With the increase of the abstract quantity, the representativeness of different senses decreases. While however the diverse senses extend, the prototypical sense and marginal senses always link together by family resemblances. In addition, as two cognitive mechanisms in semantic extension of "head" and "tou",conceptual metaphor is a mapping across two distinct domains on the basis of the principle of similarity, such as shape and appearance similarity, position similarity, function similarity and proportion similarity. While conceptual metonymy, on the strength of principles of contiguity and salience, is a mapping between two different aspects within the same domain. Lastly, metaphor and metonymy are on account of human experience, and in many regards, human experiences in different nations are the same or similar, thus there are many similar metaphors and metonymies in the sense extension of "head" and "tou". However,the understanding of these expressions by metaphor as well as metonymy is influenced, to a great degree, by specific cultures, which lead to the differences in the meaning extension of "head" and "tou". Generally,the similarities are much more popular than disparities.