A Cognitive-linguistic Approach To English-Chinese Polysemous Body Words

Polysemy is the outcome of the development of human language,which is a rather commonplace linguistic phenomenon and has long been a research focus.Different scholars have applied different theories to probe into it and have explored it from different aspects.Most prior researches emphasized too much either on the historical and social factors that contributed to the occurrence of polysemy or on the developmental model of psychological representation of polysemous words.Nevertheless,explorations into the cognitive mechanism of polysemous words based on body words are quite rare.Confucius elucidates the idea in XiCi that “obtaining inspirations from objects nearby by consulting to the body and achieving enlightenments from articles faraway by observing substances”,which demonstrates that traditional people tend to get acquainted with the unknown world by regarding themselves as criterions to measure and then reflect the unknown world to their body with which they are familiar.Weller,E.also asserts that “human body is the gauge to weigh cosmos” in Metaphor and Metonymy.These viewpoints attest the argument that embodied philosophy is the philosophical basis of cognitive linguistics.In other words,people describe language through the perception of the world and cognition of human body.Meanwhile,it incarnates that body words have been playing a paramount role in the process of the cognition of new world.Most traditional scholars applied metaphor and metonymy to study the extension of senses from primary meaning to extended meanings.However,the non-fungible functions of prototype theory and image-schematic theory are still under being neglected.Based on the margin that has not been reclaimed by the prior scholars,the present dissertation is programmed to combine prototype theory and image-schematic theory with metaphor and metonymy,three pairs of Chinese and English body words(head/tou,heart/xin,back/bei)as cases,to crystalize how polysemous words are cognized and specify the important functions of prototype theory and image-schematic theory during the cognition process.In addition,the present dissertation will find out the differences between English and Chinese by comparing their extending rules in senses and explore the reasons accounting for such differences for the purpose to reveal the cognitive differences between Chinese and English nations and to deduce the universal law for human cognitive thinking.Besides,inspirations for second-language vocabulary teaching and parent-child education will be discussed,hoping to fill in the research blanks on polysemy based on body words.Through analysis,several achievements have been obtained and the findings are as follows: Firstly,the cognition of polysemous words is inseparable from prototype and image schema.The universal cognitive law of human beings is that metaphor and metonymy perform as the keystone and prototype theory and image schema function as the supplement;Secondly,due to the facts of difference in historical culture,association,and the arbitrariness feature of language itself,semantic gap exists between English and Chinese counterparts;Thirdly,when it refers to mental activities or social aspects,Chinese body words possess more meanings than those in English.