An Empirical Study Of Non-english Majors’ Polysemy Acquisition-from The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Polysemy is a common phenomenon and an inevitable result of language development. Polysemy teaching is an important part of vocabulary learning. The research about cognitive linguistics and second language vocabulary acquisition has become one of the hottest issues recently at home and abroad. More and more linguists begin to apply cognitive linguistics theory into polysemy study and stated that the polysemy phenomenon is mainly carried out through cognitive thinking mode,e.g. metaphor and metonymy. Some empirical studies abroad obtain satisfactory results, but the number of the subjects is small and the research time is limited.Studies at home seldom focus on empirical studies. Hence, based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this study aims to explore the feasibility of applying conceptual metaphor in polysemy learning and teaching, in the hope of adding to the relevant research and providing some hints to practical teaching and learning.The subjects of this study are 121 freshmen of non-English major students from Ji Ning College. Four research hypotheses are put forward for the present study:(1)The present level of non-English major students in polysemy learning is not very well.(2) Whether the adoption of conceptual metaphor theory in English classes would help non-English major students learn polysemy.(3) Whether the students of the experimental group would produce better results of long-term retention and recall of polysemy.(4) Whether the students from Arts Department would produce better results of polysemy acquisition than students from Science Department. In order to test these hypotheses, the subjects are divided into the experimental group and the controlled group. Before the study, a pretest and a questionnaire is conducted to explore the present situation of non-English major students in polysemies learning.During the study, the teacher apply different approaches to polysemy teaching. The experimental group learned polysemy through cognitive metaphoric approach. The teacher explain how the meanings of a polysemy are related through conceptual metaphor. The controlled group learned polysemy through traditional L1 translation approach. The immediate test and the delayed test aims to make a comparison between the two groups.By analyzing the data through SPSS, this thesis conducts four major findings as follows: The present level of non-English major students in polysemy learning is not very well. Most students learn polysemy by root and repetition, which has lowefficiency. Compared with the traditional L1 translation approach, the adoption of conceptual metaphor theory in English classes can help non-English major students learn polysemy. And the students of the experimental group produce better results of long-term retention and recall of polysemy than the controlled group. At the same time, this study also proves that conceptual metaphor theory offers an effecient cognitive approach to polysemy acquisition for both students from Arts Department and Science Department. According to the results, this thesis provides some practical implications for polysemy teaching and learning. The teacher should strengthen their cognitive theory study, and pay attention to the steps of using metaphor theory-based teaching method in English class. Most importantly, the teacher should help the students apply the theory in their English learning and improve their conceptual metaphoric competence However, it is limited in that the number of subjects is relatively small, and the time span of the study was rather short. Further studies could be carried out to make up for these limitations by expanding the sample and time span.