A Study On Polysemous Derivative Model For English Basic Body-part Nouns From Cognitive Perspective

Polysemy as a pervasive language phenomenon has attracted much attention of linguistic research field. The traditional polysemous studies lay particular emphasis on the evolution of the senses of a word or the internal systematic senses of a word, but ignore the role of cognitive subject of human beings. Cognitive linguistics is a language theory which centers on “people oriented”, stressing that language, human experiences and human cognition are interwoven together. Human body is the basis for experiencing, perceiving and cognizing the objective world. Therefore, it has become a research hotspot to explore the relation between language and cognition by studying human body-part words in cognitive linguistics.At present, the cognitive study for human body-part words at home and abroad presents the features of abundance, popularity, multi-level and multi-dimension, which continuously deepens the research of human body-part words. However, there are still some issues in current studies. Firstly, metaphor is more concerned and metonymy is always ignored in analyzing human body-part words. Besides, the polysemy study into human body-part words mainly concentrates on cross-cultural comparative study, categorization and motivation study, which fails to explain the polysemous derivative process in detail.Faced with these issues, this thesis takes the prototype theory, metonymy, metaphor and metaphtonymy as the theoretical basis and adopts literature research, qualitative method, synchronic study, diachronic study, introspection, speculation and induction to explore the derivative processes for meanings of human basic body-part nouns, and constructs an English polysemous derivative model for human basic body-part nouns. Firstly, this thesis sifts and merges the entries of basic body-part nouns from the authority dictionaries, rearranges the sequence of the entries in chronological order and adopts the prototype theory to determine the prototypical meanings and the non-prototypical meanings of basic body-part nouns. And then metonymy, metaphor and metaphtonymy are used to provide the cognitive motivation for the relations between the prototypical and the non-prototypical meanings, and among the non-prototypical meanings, which explains the derivative process of each meaning. Finally, this thesis combines them with the causes and preconditions of producing polysemy, meaning transference of basic body-part nouns, the paths a polysemous word derive and the certain cognitive ability of cognitive subject to construct an English polysemous derivative model for basic body-part nouns.In the course of constructing the English polysemous derivative model for basic body-part nouns, three main features are discovered: 1. In terms of English basic body-part nouns, their meanings are mainly derived from human beings’ metonymic thinking, and some are also from metaphor and metaphtonymy. 2. There are both apparent and potential conceptual links between the prototypical meanings and the non-prototypical meanings, and among the non-prototypical meanings. 3. The features of position, appearance and function of human body-parts can work as the semantic reference for derived meanings.This research presents theoretical significance and practical significance. The former lies in the enlargement of the study perspective for basic body-part nouns, namely, apart from metaphor, metonymy and metaphotonymy can provide cognitive motivation for the derivation of meaning. As to the latter, this study has implications on English vocabulary teaching and learning and lexicography.