A Cognitive Approach To Polysemy

So far as we know, human language possesses a high economic value for a verycommon phenomenon----Polysemy existing in almost all languages. Polysemy,generally speaking, is a word having two or more meanings, including its original andextending meaning. But how does an individual word changing or extending itsmeanings make politely an intractable issue in semantic research? Taylor points outthat politely is the phenomenon which refers to a linguistic form that exhibits meaningconvergence by having two or more than two closely related meanings. Byrdteal(1987) has once said that out of approximately60,000entities in Webster’s ThirdDictionary,21,488, that is, almost40percent have two or more senses and most ofthem belong to basic vocabulary category. Polysemy not only reflects the economicprinciple of human language but also satisfies human beings’ activities to recognizethe world efficiently and easily. As one of the most variable factors in vocabularyinformation, meaning is not only playing a major role but is hard to acquire. It hasboth the diachronic and synchronic variety and changes with contexts.Now that meaning is the difficult aspect in vocabulary leaning, polysemy becomes amore difficult part to teach and learn. However, people usually pay attention to thequantity of vocabulary but not to the quality of it, thus the acquisition of meanings ofpolysemous words is not well recognized. Moreover, students do not adopt certainstrategies on polysemous words learning in most cases. They just know one or twomeanings and have a separated knowledge on meanings’ relation. That is the reasonwhy most students can not understand the whole meaning of one article though theyknow most words. Traditional linguists tend to focus on its internal structure and thedistinction between different meanings of a polyseme, and thus can not reveal thenature of polysemy. Cognitive linguists such as Gibbs，Lakoff, and Rosch, etc. offer amore thorough and systematic way to the analysis of polysemy. They assert that aword meaning is an open system which is subject to change and evolution. Polysemyis regarded as a result of human cognition. Recently, the studies on polysemous words do not confine to conventionalsemantics category anymore, but is extended to cognitive linguistics category. Moreand more linguistics put their efforts on the study of polysemy. Many scholars analyzeand study the production mechanism of polysemous words and their effective learningstrategies. The cognitive linguistics, which originated at the end of1970’and receivedrapid developed between1980’ and1990’, mainly studies the relationship betweenlanguage and the mode of cognition, concept structure, semantic system, and humanknowledge and culture stipulations. It intends to explain the cognitive rules behind thelanguage. The prototype theory originates in the mid1970s’with Eleanor Rosch’sresearch into the internal structure of categories. Through the comparative study oncategories within different cultures, Rosch found that many categories are organizedbased on the prototypes. The judgment on whether one object belongs to one categorydoes not depend on whether it has all the common attributes of category members buton whether it has the family resemblance with the category members. Based on thefamily resemblance proposed by Wittgenstein in1950’,LaBeouf，Rauch and Lakoffconducted a quantitive study on some basic concepts(like cup, bird, fruit etc.) andthen established the prototype theory. The prototype theory holds the views that theprototypical categories cannot be defined by means of a single set ofcriteria(necessary and sufficient)attributes; prototypical categories exhibit a familyresemblance structure, or more generally, their semantic structure takes the form of aradial set of clustered and overlapping meanings; prototypical categories exhibitdegrees of category membership; not every member is equally representative for acategory; prototypical categories are blurred at the edges. After the proposition of thistheory, some linguistics started to organize the hypothesis of applying the theory intosemantic study. The prototype theory within cognitive linguistics believes that apolyseme category exhibits a family resemblance. The senses of a polysemous wordshow a family resemblance; peripheral meanings are derived from a central prototype(prototypical meaning) through the two principles of metaphor and metonymy. Theprocess of polysemization is the process of derivation ofnon-prototypical members ofone polyseme category based on the prototypical member and the splitting of theprototypical member. The different meanings of a polyseme form an interrelated andinteractional whole. Generally speaking, there are three models for meanings’relation–concatenation, radiation and half-radiation. The development of cognitivelinguistics helps us break through the fence of structuralism and formalism and explain the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy from the external world and from theperspective of the human subjective interaction with the objective world. This thesis,based on the two working principles of categorization in cognitive linguistics, makesa tentative study on polysemy in terms of internal structure of polysemy. Throughthese two principles, the theory of gestalt perception and the theory of familyresemblance, the study of polysemous words is changed into the question of findingthe possible relationship between the basic meanings and the extended meanings.These two working principles have also offered evidence to show that metaphor andmetonymy are the most basic and important means in the process of meaningextension of polysemous words.This thesis analyzes polysemy based on the basic theory from a cognitiveperspective. It conducts a case study of HEAD (头) from metaphor and metonymy，two ways to extending meaning, and a mass of Chinese and English examples todeeply analyse the internal structure and semantic extension mechanism. Through thisthesis, we learn that: polyseme is a category in which distinct meanings distributearound a central or prototypical meaning. These distinct meanings gather in thecategory by means of radiation and chaining, and with this we hope to reveal thecognitive nature of polysemy.