A Metaphorical And Metonymic Study Of Meaning Extension Of Nouns In English

Polysemy is the most pervasive phenomenon in semantics.Abundant research has been conducted on polysemy and word meaning extension both at home and abroad.On the study of the causes of word meaning extension,the traditional accounts mainly resort to the superfacial factors such as social or historical factors.While the cognitive semantics argues that varied meanings of the polysemous words are not arbitrary but are derived from the prototypical meaning of a word through specific semantic extending mechanism such as metaphorical and metonymic mechanism.Based on the cognitive semantic theories,this thesis attempts to make a metaphorical and metonymic study of meaning extension of nouns in English with the Oxford English Dictionary(the OED)as the source of data.The research touches upon some essential questions such as the similarities and differences between different nouns.As a result of the contrastive analysis,a conclusion can be summarized that there are some similarities and differences between lexical meaning extension of different nouns,including three similarities and two differences.As for the similarities,at first,words in the same category have common patterns in their semantic extension.Then,in the process of lexical meaning extension of nouns,the concurrence phenomena exist and they have formed semantic chains,meanwhile,senses in a semantic chain are connected by metaphor and metonymy through different word classes.Finally,some lexical meanings of nouns in English are unique.On the other hand,they are different in two aspects: cognitive images and semantic extension mechanism.In the semantic extension of concrete nouns,people always take cognitive images from its appearance,position and function,and metaphorical semantic extension is as important as the metonymic one;while in the semantic extension of abstract nouns,people often take cognitive images from the perspective of contiguity and most sensesare derived through metonymy.What is new in this paper is that the author has found and summarized the basic semantic extension patterns of some categories,which is helpful to the learning and teaching of nouns in English.