| Cognitive linguistics is developing very fast in recent years. It provides a new method for studying the polysemies, In this paper, the researcher uses the notional verb take which has different meanings in different contexts as an example. Therefore, the paper attempts to make the verb take as a breakthrough point to investigate the relationships among the different senses in terms of cognitive perspective, mainly employing image schema, conceptual metaphor and ICM (idealized cognitive model) theory. Firstly,26different literal meanings and lots of examples of take are collected from three dictionaries and the two corpora, Brown and FLOB. Then, the paper also explores the senses of the verb take by quantitative and qualitative analysis from cognitive perspective. They are divided into three categories:the basic central meaning, the elaborations of take and the metaphorical extensions of take. Last but not least, based on the ICM theory, the relationships among the CMs and ICM are explored.Through the study, the conclusions drawn by this thesis are as follows:The basic central meaning of take is to move something from one place to another place. It is the highest frequency of the verb take used in the corpora. And based on the image schema theory, the other19elaborations are divided into four categories. There are six metaphorical extensions of take investigated by using the conceptual metaphor theory. Based on the ICM theory, the study indicates that the semantic categories of take are based on the ICM. Between the members in the category, the one fitting all the elements in the ICM is the prototype of the category, while other non-typical members, the CMs, are still closely related to the prototype, because they derive from the prototype by losing a few elements in the ICM. At the same time, the semantic categories of take are expanded from the prototype. It proved that cognitive linguistics is a new approach and a new perspective of English learning and teaching. |
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