| Polysemy is a universal phenomenon of natural languages, the research of which has a long history in the fields of linguistic philosophy and linguistics. To foreign language learners, polysemy has long been a great challenge for the reason that the multiple senses of a polysemous word have often been deemed as unrelated to each other. As the cognitive linguistics rises, people get further understanding of the relationship between the multiple senses of a polysemous word. Cognitive linguistics holds that the multiple senses of a polysemous word are related to one another by means of such cognitive motivations as metaphor, metonymy, image-schema transformation, etc.. It is learnt that the research on polysemous words from the perspective of cognitive linguistics has achieved a lot.Polysemy is an important feature of legal English words. However, the application of the theory of cognitive linguistics to the research of polysemous words in legal English is still rarely seen. Moreover, the polysemy of legal English words creates barriers for the translation of legal English. Given this, this thesis, based upon the theory of cognitive linguistics, combined with legal translation practice, attempts to answer the following two questions: 1. What are the cognitive motivations of the polysemous words in legal English? 2. How to determine the meaning of the polysemous words in legal English in legal translation? Through analysis, the thesis finds that conceptual metaphor and metonymy are the main cognitive motivations for the polysemous words in legal English, and that in translation, the topic context and the collocation context can be referred to for determining the meaning of the polysemous words in legal English. |
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