A Cognitive Study Of The Meanings Of Polysemous Words

Within the three areas of semantic study: sound, morpheme and meaning, meaning remains to be an area not well studied so far. For it is too complicated and indefinite to reach a meaningful universal theoretical conclusion. At the same time, it is an important area which philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and linguists concern very much. Some topics in semantic study are still controversial topics. Polysemy is such a topic.Polysemy is a common phenomenon in all human natural languages, while different linguists of different schools explain the process of polysemous words formed with quite different methods, and their opinions diverge on describing the varied sense relationships of the word. The history of polysemy semantic studies has been divided into three stages: 1. philological period; 2. traditional semantics period; 3. modern semantics period. The ahtuor thinks one more period should be added, that is, cognitive semantics period. The author thinks that the following theories, the naming theory, historical comparative linguistics, the theory of semiotic triangle, Componential analysis (CA) and cognitive semantics, are separately the typical representatives of these four stages.According to George Lakoff, the former four theories are called objectivism, while cognitive semantics should be called subjectivism. The author's literature review shows that their dilemma is due to their angles of research. All the traditional objectivist linguistic studies hope to solve the problem by analyzing the relationships between the word and physical world, logic concept or other language units smaller than words, but they neglect an important factor, the users of language: human beings, who influence the development of meanings of polysemous words. In practical linguistic research, their theories can not offer scientific interpretations of polysemy, for many language facts have challenged the rules in their theories. Opposite to objectivist theories, cognitive semantics has made a breakthrough in interpreting lexical meanings and development of meanings of polysemous words by considering human cognition and its relation with the forming of multiple meanings in polysemous words on the basis of some cognitive psychological concepts.According to cognitive semantics, cognitive methods based on human bodily experience and perception function universally in all aspects of human thinking including language, for language is part of human thinking. Man has come to understand physical...