A Probe Into Polysemy Access Of Intermediate Chinese Level Foreign Students

Polysemous words are frequently used in modern Chinese vocabulary.Access to polysemous meanings is the focus of academic attention.With the development of research,scholars generally agree that context and relative frequency of meanings affect the accessibility of polysemous words.However,the existing research on polysemy access is mainly based on native speakers.There is no research on second language polysemy access,especially for Chinese learners.This paper investigates the accessibility of polysemous words by Chinese learners at intermediate level by means of paper-pencil test.According to the order of polysemous words in dictionary interpretation,40 polysemous words and their main and secondary meanings are selected preliminarily.Then,according to the evaluation experiment for native speakers,17 polysemous words with qualifications are determined,and their main and secondary meanings are also determined.Three sentence contexts were designed,which were biased toward the main meaning context,biased toward the secondary meaning context and unbiased neutral context.The subjects were asked to choose the appropriate meanings of polysemous words after reading the sentences.The results show that in the neutral context,because it is difficult for foreign students to access both meanings of polysemy at the same time,the correct rate of polysemy access is not high;the foreign students' access rate and grasp degree of the main meanings of polysemy are higher than that of the secondary meanings.In biased contexts,the accuracy of choosing appropriate meanings is greatly improved under the condition of context constraints,whether it is the context biased towards the main meaning or the context biased towards the minor meaning,compared with the neutral context;the accuracy of the context biased towards the main meaning is higher than that biased towards the minor meaning.This shows that context and frequency of meanings have an impact on the access of polysemous words.The results support the rearrangement access model.Based on the research results,this paper puts forward the teaching strategies of polysemous words in TCFL.