| Polysemy refers to such a phenomenon that a word has two or more meanings,and there are some connections between these meanings.Polysemy is pervasive in human languages,hence for long years they have been becoming the research focus and difficulty as well for various linguistic schools.Many issues concerning polysemy have been discussed in previous studies,focusing mainly on the division of polysemous meanings and the rules of meaning extension.However,cross-linguistically comparative studies of polysemes adopting quantitative method are quite rare to find.In view of the above situations,this thesis endeavors to explore the quantitative properties of Chinese and English polysemes and their semantic orientations.Two normative dictionaries that embody the full view of Chinese and English words,i.e.The Modern Chinese Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary are used as sources,from which the Chinese and English polysemes are drawn.These polysemes are the research objects.Based on a self-built corpus,quantitative analyses are performed on the polysemous words and their semantic orientations in order to discover the similarities and differences between the two languages.Three research questions are mainly involved:(1)What are the similarities among sense,word length and word frequency of polysemes in Chinese and English? And the reasons are behind them.(2)What are the differences among the sense,word length,and word frequency of polysemes in English and Chinese?And the reasons are behind them.(3)What are the similarities and differences in semantic orientations between English and Chinese polysemes?It was found that:(1)The more senses of English and Chinese polysemous words are,the shorter the word length is and the higher the word frequency is.The reason is that English and Chinese polysemous words have good denotations and extensions.The more senses are,the better the collocation ability is,the more occasions they are used,and the higher the frequency is,the more likely the language form will be simplified.(2)There are many differences in English and Chinese polysemy.For instance,there are more polysemes in English,English polysemes have more senses in average than Chinese polysemes,and English polysemes are averagely longer than Chinese polysemes.From the perspective of way of word formation,foreign words are the major cause of more English polysemes.From the aspect of structure of language,Chinese is an ideographic language,it is transparent and logical in realizing the symbol and meaning.But English is not the same as Chinese.A word can be added more meanings and evolve wider and wider due to the arbitrariness of symbol and meaning.From the quantity of syllables,Chinese words are apt to two-syllable,but English words have no this orientation.(3)Semantic orientations of English and Chinese polysemous words have some similarities: Firstly,because the way they are formed is the same.Secondly,both English and Chinese polysemous words own more than one semantic orientation.Thirdly,both English and Chinese monosemes reflect the phenomenon of a word with a single meaning with more than one semantic orientation.The differences between English and Chinese lie in two aspects.On the one hand,semantic orientations of polysemous nouns and polysemous adjectives in English are more abundant,and semantic orientations of polysemous nouns and polysemous verbs in Chinese are richer.On the other hand,semantic orientations have national and regional differences.This thesis enriches the comparative study of English and Chinese to a certain extent,broadens the research perspective of polysemy and their semantic orientations,improves the accuracy and scientificity of language research,makes up for the shortcomings of traditional methods,and provides the fields of language teaching and natural language processing for a high practical value. |
