The Cognitive Study On The Polysemy Of English Motion Verb Turn And Its Core Verb Phrases

In the field of linguistics,polysemy has always been the focus of linguistic study,for it is one of the three intrinsic natures of language,while the other two are embodiment and metaphority.Through Semantic Component Analysis,and Semantic Field Theory,which center on semantic researches,structuralist school,functional school and other traditional semantic schools promote the development of semantics.In turn,they also provide some theoretical supports on the analysis of the phenomenon of polysemy.However,ignoring the influence of human cognition on language and only focusing on the internal language itself,the traditional school is relatively isolated in the study of polysemy.While cognitive linguistics combines our understanding of the natural world,the social world and embodiment experiences with language phenomena to analyse its intrinsic motivation.Therefore,the study of polysemy in cognitive linguistics begins with the extension in motivation of multiple senses and combines the human cognitive analysis with the internal mechanism of polysemy.Although scholars at home and abroad have carried out a lot of researches on polysemy,most of them concentrate on the analysis of nouns and prepositions,and there is little research on the polysemy of verbs.Thus,the thesis selects motion verb turn as the research object,based on the semantic dictionary and corpus as the linguistic data source,and using the introspective method to analyze the polysemy phenomenon of turn and its core phrases.In this paper,the 18 senses of the verb turn are picked up from by Collins Cobuild Learner's Dictionary.As a source of corpus,the American contemporary English corpus is selected as the research object by randomly selecting 1000 words with context from the 132057 words of turn.Then each turn in samples is with the determined sense in a particular context,and classified into the established 18 senses.Combining with the data frequency statistics,the prototypical sense of turn is cryslalized according to Tyler and Evans' s Principled Polysemy Model.And its image schema is constructed.Furthermore,under Talmy's motion event,the prototypical sense of turn and its image schema is construed.On the basis of the turn's prototypical senses,the semanticextension path and intrinsic mechanisms are analyzed to construct the polysemy network of motion verb turn.Through the Conceptual Blending Theory,the author analyzes the senses derivation mechanism of turn's core phrases and constructs its polysemy network.Therefore,the findings of the thesis are unfolded as follows:Firstly,there are prototypical sense and non-prototypical senses among all the senses of turn,and its prototypical sense is the most specific one.Secondly,each non-prototypical sense of turn has a different degree of relevance to the prototypical sense and is derived from the prototypical sense into other conceptual domains.Thirdly,there are three kinds of conceptual mechanisms underlying the senses extension of turn,namely,image schema transformation,conceptual metaphor and metonymy.According to this conclusion,with the prototypical sense as the center,through the chain type and radiation type staggered extension way,and combined with three kinds of extension mechanisms to derive the other 17 non-prototypical senses,the network of turn is built.And it found that the network is a semantic continuum from spatial domain to the space domain,from concrete to abstract,from the physical world extend to the mental world and social world,and from the typical to the non-typical.Finally,the core verb phrases of turn also have multiple senses,and their senses can be analyzed through the Concept Blending Theory,and the polysemy network can be established through the same way of verb turn's semantic network.This thesis studies on the polysemy of English motion verb turn and its core verb phrases from the perspective of cognition,it may give some enlightenment to the analysis of other motion verbs on the research method,and it may also provide some practical significance for English learners and lexicographers.