A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemy Of Through

Polysemy is an important issue in the current linguistic study. Traditional linguists have argued that mental lexicon is an arbitrary list of lexemes and context-dependant. The analyses on Polysemy should be made at sentence level. They adopt a descriptive approach toward the semantics of prepositional polysemy, which just puts emphasis on the function of prepositions in relation with other word classes and neglects the internal relationships among the complex meanings. In contrast, cognitive linguists take a different perspective. They focus on the prepositional polysemy. From their point of view, prepositional polysmy refers to the phenomenon whereby a single preposition is associated with a number of related but distinct meanings. Surrounding the core meaning, a semantic or polysemy network is formed. With this common belief, cognitive linguists have developed various research ways. Among them, the Principle Polysemy Approach proposed by Tyler and Evans (2001,2003) shows its advantage. After making an extensive investigation on previous researches, Tyler and Evans establish a set of terms including primary sense, proto-scene, distinct sense and cluster of sense. They define the primary sense of a spatial particle as the proto-scene and establish the well-motivated criteria for determining the proto-scene and distinct senses associated with a preposition. They take account of meaning construction as a process which relies upon conceptual integration of linguistic and non-linguistic prompts, guided by various global cognitive principles such as reconceptualization, inferencing strategies and pragmatic strengthening.Inspired by the polysemy researches done within the framework of cognitive semantics , the author attempts to analyze the polysemy of through on the basis of Principle Polysemy Approach proposed by Tyler and Evans. The polysemy network of through can be described as: (1) the proto-scene associated with through denotes the spatial configuration that a trajectory (TR) traversed with a bounded landmark (LM) by the virtue of an entrance point and an end point. The functional configurance of the proto-scene is the notion of path, that is, contiguous locations along the LM; (2) the present study determines 10 distinct senses associated with the preposition through. Among them, six distinct senses belong to the A-B-C Trajectory Cluster; two distinct senses belong to the Up-to-the-end Cluster and the rest two belong to two quasi-clusters respectively; (3) the A-B-C Trajectory Cluster,the Up-to-the-end Cluster and two quasi-clusters, surrounding the proto-scene of through, consist of its polysemy network.The significance of the present research lies in the following aspects: (1) even though some researchers have analyzed the preposition through, few have ever worked out a systematic semantic structure of it in the light of cognitive linguistics; (2) by adopting Tyler and Evans' Model of Principle Polysemy, the thesis further proves the feasibility of this cognitive model; (3) based on the analyses of polysemy network associated with through, the present research proposes a Central-peripheral Method for the teaching of prepositions in the hope of offering help to the teachers and students.