Cognitive Study Of English Polysemous Words Acquisition

It has been proved that polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon,which is considered as the source of language economy.Polysemy has been the focus of linguistic researches and language leaning.As far as the polysemous word study is concerned,traditional linguistic researches are lack of multidimensional researches on the effective acquisition of polysemous words.They put more emphasis on its explicit linguistic features,whereas little on the role of cognitive factors in the process of multi-meaning construction.The development of L2 learner’s lexical knowledge has proved that conceptual knowledge is the major factor of restricting learner’s effective acquisition of lexical knowledge.In order to learn how cognitive factors practically work in lexical semantic processing,four typical English polysemous words are chosen to make case study under the guidance of the newly developed theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models(Evans,2009.LCCM for short).This thesis analyzes the characteristics of polysemous word construction and lexical semantic processing,explores the differences and causes of target words used by native speakers and L2 learners,and puts forward suggestions on how L2 acquire polysemy effectively in language learning.Supported by LCCM Theory,this thesis argues that the formation of lexical meaning and the construction of multi-meanings are the products of the interaction between linguistic knowledge and encyclopaedic knowledge.The meaning construction is a complex process which undergoes from the selection of lexical concept to the fusion.It is achieved by both the linguistic knowledge and conceptual knowledge.Based on this,this thesis analyzes the semantic construction process of target polysemous words first and argues that learner’s conceptual knowledge is especially crucial in the process of fusion.Then,three surveys are designed to get some basic data of different subjects from the aspects of polysemous words in use,mental representation and the input in language learning,namely corpus-based survey,Word Association Test(WAT)surveyand questionnaire survey.The data are processed by SPSS17.0 and analyzed based on LCCM Theory.COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)and CLEC(The Chinese Learner English Corpus)shows that native speakers tend to use polysemous word more comprehensively than non-native speakers.And the data analysis of WAT indicates that different mental representation is obtained by different language level L2.Upper intermediate L2 learners focus on the acquisition of semantic meaning,while beginners pay more attention to the literal meaning and collocations.Meanwhile,the analysis of questionnaire survey considers the word input in language learning somewhat affect the efficiency of polysemous words acquisition.Both the qualitative study and quantitative study prove that native speakers’ lexical knowledge is more comprehensive than non-native speakers and L2 learners put more emphasis on the literal meaning of polysemous words but little on the input of conceptual knowledge.Lack of intentional lexical concept input is the major factor of restricting learner’s effective acquisition of polysemous words.Hence,some suggestions are proposed in this thesis.This thesis suggests,the teaching methods which can activate students to learn the lexical concepts of certain word should be adopted by language teachers.Further,teachers need to cultivate students’ awareness of strengthening their own cognitive abilities.The acquisition of polysemous words is based on the acquisition of comprehensive linguistic knowledge and conceptual knowledge.It is necessary for L2 learners to emphasize the great importance of lexical concept and cognitive ability and continuously enrich the conceptual knowledge to acquire polysemous words effectively.