A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Polysemous "Head/Tou" Between English And Chinese

The basic unit of language is word and the core of word is meaning.At the beginning,words are monotonous,and they are distinct from each other.With the in-depth development of understanding and cognition of the outer world,people begin to extend the basic meaning of words,so polysemous words emerge as the times require.Many scholars have studied this phenomenon from different perspectives,however,most of the research focused on the external causes of semantic extension and lost sight of the internal relations of extended meanings.The world is grounded on human beings' experience,and body words play a foremost role in the process of human cognition.Head,as an important human body organ,makes people have the capability to think,cognize and judge,and also offers an exceptional view point for people to perceive the world.However,not many researches have been conducted on“head/tou” from the cognitive perspective.Cognitive linguists focus on the cognitive mechanism behind polysemy and maintain that polysemy is the result of cognitive categorization and conceptualization through metaphor and metonymy cognition.Different as they are,the boundaries of metaphor and metonymy are blurred and intermingled.A great number of scholars applies metaphor and metonymy to do the research on the process of senses extension which is from original meaning to extended meanings.However,too much emphasis is placed on conceptual metaphor,they think that metaphor has obvious semantic characteristic in meaning extension.The conceptual metonymy and the interaction of metaphor and metonymy on polysemy are still under being neglected.Based on previous studies,the present dissertation is programmed to explore the cognitive mechanism of the polysemy of the human body word “head/tou” and use the conceptual metaphor theory,conceptual metonymy theory and the theoreticalframework of the interaction between metaphor and metonymy as the theoretical basis.Based on the collection of a large number of materials from four authoritative dictionaries and English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpora(ECBPC).The dissertation will adopt quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct a contrastive study on different meanings of “head/tou” in order to find out the similarities and differences of meaning extension between English and Chinese and explore the reasons accounting for such differences.The author hopes to shed light on the further research to reveal the cognitive differences between Chinese and English and to figure out the universal law of cognitive between English and Chinese.In addition,in view of the contrastive analysis on polysemous word “head/tou”,the author will try to discuss the function and status of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy in semantic extension.The major findings of the present study are the followings:(1)The extended meaning of “head/tou” are widely used in English and Chinese in our daily life,but there exists semantic gap between “head” in English and “tou” in Chinese(2)The similarities outweigh the differences in meaning extensions of “head/tou” by metaphor and metonymy.(3)Metaphor and metonymy which are different and related either,are two ways in the extension of word meaning.Metonymy is a more basic cognitive tool than metaphor and metonymy play a more important role in the extension of word meaning “head/tou”.