An Empirical Study Of Chinese English Majors' English Polysemous Representation

Polysemy refers to the phonomenon that a word has numbers of related senses, which is a ubiquitous phenomenon in any language. Polysemy has long been approached from varieties of dimensions and the study of the polysemous representation is not only significant for theoretic construction, but also sheds light on some practical area, such as vocabulary acquisition, and lexicography.Croft (1998) outlines four possible models for the mental representation of different usages of a single lexical item. Among these four basic models, the formal and cognitive linguists bias different models based on introspective linguistic data. However, it is widely acknowledged that introspective linguistic data alone can not determine the right model of mental representation without evidence from actual usage or psycholinguistic experiments. The psycholinguistic study of polysemous representation is a heated issue but the researches yield no agreement. The dispute is around the issue that whether senses of polysemous word are represented distinctly or only the core sense is represented and other senses are generated on the fly. Zhao (2006) terms these competing views as the core-sense view, the separate-sense view, and the mediated view. Despite many discrepancies, almost all the views treat polysemous representation as a static phenomenon and seldom investigate factors which would influence polysemous representation.The previous experiments exclusively take L1 speakers as subjects and few take L2 learners as subjects. This paper attempts to use Chinese English majors as subjects to explore polysemous representation. In this factorial design, there are three factors involved. The first factor is language proficiency; the second factor is part of speech of the polysemous words; the third factor is concerned with mechanism of polysemous extension. This experiment material consists of 20 polysemes, which are carefully chosen by means of vocabulary knowledge scale test and the frequency of these words is strictly controlled according to Longman Contemporary English Dictionary. The subjects are made up by two groups of English majors from Grade1 and Grade 3. The experiment has two instruments: the first one is English-Chinese translation, which aims to investigate the representation pattern; the second one is judgement of the strength of sense relatedness with an aim to probe into the effect of different factors on the scores of sense relatedness.The results of this research show that: 1) the high proficiency group is inclined to prefer core-sense representation and different senses are more closely related while the high proficiency group tends to favor separate-sense representation and different senses are more loosely related; 2) the representation difference between polysemous words of three different parts of speech, namely noun, verb, and adjective, is not statistically significant; 3) polysemous words with senses which are generated by the cognitive mechanism of metaphor are represented differently from polysemous words with senses which are generated by the mechanism of metonymy. Metaphoric senses show a preference for separate-sense representation and the strength of sense relatedness between metaphoric sense and its primary sense is looser than that between metonymic sense and its primary sense.