A Contrastive Analysis Of The Polysemy Of Human-Body Word "Arm/臂" From A Cognitive Perspective

Polysemy is not only a universal linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon. At the very beginning when languages came out into being, one sign only represented one meaning. With the development of society and people’s cognitive ability, one single sign could no more satisfy people’s communicative and cognitive needs. Meanwhile, it would take a long time and more energy to member the newly created linguistic form. Under such circumstances, polysemy came into existence. In the interpretation of polysemy, many scholars have tried their hands. The traditional approaches represented by classicism and structuralism are static, treating the meanings of words in an isolated manner, taking no considerations of the connections behind meanings. On the other hand, as a dynamic research method, the cognitive approach lays emphasis on the cognitive mechanism of polysemy. According to cognitive linguistics, polysemy is based on conceptual metaphor and metonymy.Among all the studies of polysemy, the ones on human body words have always caught the scholar’s eyeballs. For one thing, as the basic-level words, human body words can be polysemous easily. For another, human being’s cognition always follows the procedure from the near to the far, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. As a concept most familiar to us, human body words can usually used to perceive and measure the outside world. This bodily experience also lays the philosophical foundation of meaning extensions. The reason why we took "ar/臂" as our case study is that, although scholars at home and abraod have investigated human body word from different perspectives, the studies of "arm/臂" are rare. What is more, most studies over-emphasized metaphor at the cost of metonymy.Based on the above introduction, the author tried to explore "arm/臂" from the perspective of metaphor and metonymy. We resort to 5 printed dictionaries and two online dictionaries to collect the data. Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in our thesis. At first, we checked the various meanings of "arm/臂". Then based on the closeness of meanings, we divided them into two categories, meanings derived by metaphor and meanings derived metonymy. After a brief analysis, we did a detailed investigation and tried to account for the similarities and differences found in the process.Our result was:in "arm/臂", there were more similarities than differences in the meaning extensions by metaphor and metonymy. The similarities were caused by the cognitive universality, whereas the differences were caused by different thinking modes and cultural habits. The research result might shed some lights on the teaching and learning of polysemy.