A Cognitive Approach To Polysemy Of English Preposition Through

Language is a dynamic system with gradual development.Polysemy exists generally in human’s language phenomenon.It helps people lighten the burden of memorizing words by providing a word with more than one meaning.When a word appears,it’s usually monosemous.However,with the development of human’s cognition and the generation of new ideas and things,monosemy can’t meet the needs of people’s cognizing the new world.The polysemization of words is inevitable,and monosemous phenomenon developed gradually into polysemy phenomenon which not only provides an effective way for people to perceive the new world,but also shows the economical principle of human’s languages.Lyons(1995)once pointed out that "It is almost certainly the case that there are no natural languages,and never have been,in which every word has one and only one meaning".The researches of polysemy can be traced back to the period of Aristotle.He thought that it served as a necessary requirement to understand the infinite world via using limited means.The phenomenon of polysemy attracts a lot of scholars’ attention both abroad and in China.Based on the traditional view,it was just studied by means of semantic structure,ignoring the role of human’s cognition.However,according to cognitive linguists,meanings are encyclopedic,which contains human’s cognition towards the external world.Many a cognitive linguist described the phenomenon of polysemy on the basis of prototype theory,image schema and metaphor.According to them,there exist prototypical senses and non-prototypical senses among the multiple senses of a word.The prototypical sense is the most typical one,which appears earliest and is used most frequently.Those non-prototypical senses extend from the prototypical one.According to cognitive linguists,meaning extensions are motivated by image schema and metaphor.Image schemas are abstract structures which present meanings and concepts.They appear when human interacts with the objective world.The nature of metaphor is a method for human to understand unfamiliar and abstract concepts in terms of familiar and concrete concepts.This thesis attempts to analyze the English preposition through from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Many researches of prepositions have been made abroad and in China.However,most of them focus on prepositions on and over.The researches of through are relatively less.Preposition through is one of the prepositions that are used most frequently.It plays an important role in our daily communication.On the basis of prototype theory,image schema,metaphor and the model of principled polysemy put forward by Tyler and Evans,this thesis aims to study the polysemy phenomenon of English preposition through.All the senses of through come from the New Oxford American Dictionary,and all the data come from the BNC.Among the 80364 items of through in the BNC,1000 of them are selected randomly to provide data for analyzing through.According to the analysis,816 items of the 1000 items are available.The meanings of through used in the data are classified into the five core senses in the dictionary.Based on the five criteria which determine the prototypical sense(put forward by Tyler and Evans),one of the five senses is determined to be the prototypical sense,while the other four are non-prototypical senses.Then this study attempts to analyze how these non-prototypical senses extend from the prototypical one.Therefore,the conclusion can be drawn:based on the senses provided by the New Oxford American Dictionary,there exist a prototypical sense of through,and it has certain relations with non-prototypical senses which extend from the prototypical sense by means of metaphor and image schema.This study is useful for English vocabulary teaching.Teachers can help students memorize and learn vocabularies by understanding semantic structures,relations among the senses of a word,and theories of meaning extensions.It can lighten students’ burden of memorizing words and improve their learning efficiency.In addition,this study also provides some implications for compiling dictionaries.