A Cognitive Study Of Jin's And Gold's Meaning Extension In Contrast

Polysemy is the most common phenomenon in language,and different schools of scholars have investigated it from different perspectives.Cognitive linguistics hold that polysemy concerns the process in which a word enlarges its basic meaning or central meaning to extended meanings pertaining to different cognitive domains by means of cognitive mechanisms of human beings.Metonymy and metaphor are deemed as two major mechanisms of lexical meaning extension.Guided by two meaning extension mechanisms of conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor,this research probes into original meanings and extended meanings of the polysemes ? and gold.By comparative analysis of similarities and differences of meanings of ? and gold,this research endeavors to find reasons for similar and different cognition of these two words.The research adopts the corpus-based approach.C hinese data of the study are drawn from the modern Chinese part of Center for Chinese Linguistics(CCL).English data are collected from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).Both of these two corpora are large-scale authoritative corpora with wide applications,thus ensuring the adequacy and correctness of our data.On the basis of statistical analysis and comparisons,it is found that ? in modern Chinese and gold in English possess the same literal meaning.Properties,functions,value and status of ?/ gold produce abundant metonymic and metaphorical meanings in both C hinese and English.However,extended meanings of ?/ gold derived from metonymy and metaphor share similarities as well as differences.Main findings of the study are summarized as below.Firstly,Chinese ? and English gold possess the same literal meaning,referring to the bright yellow precious metal.However,it is found that gold in English is more frequently used in its original sense than ? in C hinese.Secondly,? is metonymically mapped onto six cognitive domains,producing eight concrete extended meanings.Gold in English is also projected onto six cognitive domains,generating eight concrete metonymic senses.? and gold enjoy four common semantic domains.However,? is cognized to two unique semantic domains,? for metals and ? for things made from metals.While gold alone is extended to gold for price of gold and gold for bull's eye.According to the statistics,metonymic extensions occur more frequently in gold than in ?.Similar metonymic extensions of ? and gold are clarified by the features of gold(physical properties and functions of gold)as well as the principle of language(the economic principle of language).And different metonymic meanings of ?/ gold are discussed in aspects of exclusive language attributes,diverse modes of thinking as well as distinct history and culture.What is more,? is metaphorically mapped onto nine cognitive domains,creating seventeen concrete metaphorical meanings.Gold is metaphorically extended to eight cognitive domains,generating sixteen concrete extended meanings.Among them,they share seven common cognitive domains,fifteen concrete metaphorical meanings.? in Chinese possesses exclusive mappings of ? as one of the five elements and ? as the government.In contrast,gold in English brings about exclusive mappings of gold as mental development of human beings.It is found that ? takes on the metaphorical meanings more frequently than gold.Similar metaphorical extensions of ? and gold are also explained by the features of gold(properties,functions,value and status of gold)and principle of language(metaphor in compounds).Also different metaphorical meanings of ?/ gold are discussed by exclusive language attributes,diverse modes of thinking as well as distinct history and culture.