| Polysemy is a ubiquitous phenomenon in language.It reflects the economy of language on the one hand.On the other hand,it has hindered language learners from understanding and memorizing the various senses of polysemous words.Polysemous words become the obstacles in English teaching and learning practice.Previous related studies mainly focus on the research on language phenomenon itself,or the corresponding teaching experiments.Due attention should be paid to the process how learners understanding the polysemous words.The current investigation is to explore the polysemy lexical inferencing process of Chinese English learners,based on the reasoning principle and encyclopedic principle of cognitive linguistics.It emphasizes the knowledge sources and strategies employed by the learners.As to research participants,34 English majors from a university in Shaanxi Province volunteered for the research at first.After a vocabulary test and the thinking-aloud training,29 participants moved in to the final experiments.The instrument used for thinking-aloud task is taken from Foraker and Murphy's studies,while the research material applied in vocabulary size test is by Nation and Beglar.The two instruments both are verified by experiments.For research methods,thinking-aloud protocols and retrospective interview are applied in the current investigation.For data analysis,the transcripts from the TAPs tasks and the retrospective interviews are analyzed with the assistance of Nvivo 11.0 plus,which is mainly used for qualitative data analysis.The nodes and codes are abstracted with the help of this software,and then the reference points and material sources are calculated for further statistical analyses.The frequencies figured out from the qualitative data then are processed in relative statistical analyses with the help of SPSS 17.0.The qualitative data analysis leads to three knowledge sources and four inferencing strategies for polysemy lexical inferencing,while the quantitate data analysis shows its results in the relationship exploration.There are several main findings of the present investigation.At first,the most frequently used knowledge source is the world source,the context knowledge comes in the second place,and the lowest frequency appears in the linguistic knowledge.This knowledge source is found mainly taken as an assistant knowledge source to help learners decide the specific sense of polysemous words.What's more,among the four strategies,generalization is used least frequently compared with metonymy,metaphor,and specialization.In addition,there are three positive correlations found between different variables.The English learners who have a larger vocabulary size turn to have a better performance in polysemy lexical inferencing task.Learners who have a higher frequency of activating knowledge sources do better in the task as well.A significant positive correlation is also figured out between the strategy using frequency and the TAPs task scores.In accordance with the conclusions above,corresponding implications for English teaching and learning are conducted.When confronted with polysemous words,teachers can explain the relationships among the basic senses and the derived senses of polysemous words consciously.In this way,they may help the learners establish a lexical network of a certain polysemous word.In addition to learning about knowledge of polysemous words,teachers and learners are supposed to notice the function of knowledge sources.Besides,strategy explanations and training are necessary for understanding English polysemous words.At last,embodiment and experience should be highlighted in foreign language teaching activities.Teachers can guide students to learn new words through experience,which may activate the relationship between action and language.Students would have deeper impression of the knowledge about the language. |
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