A Cognitive Analysis Of The Polysemous Word "Open" Based On Corpora

Polysemy is one of the most prevalent and significant semantic phenomena in English,therefore,it has always been a focus of study.In recent years,linguists are keen on exploring polysemy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.This research attempts to study the polysemous word "open" from a cognitive perspective.First of all,combing qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis,this thesis made a contrastive study of "open",taking the British National Corpus(BNC)as the reference corpus,and the Chinese English Corpus of China Daily(CECCHD)as the observed corpus.Then,the significant collocations,observed frequency,co-occurred frequency,MI value and Z-score of "open" were retrieved in both corpora in virtue of WordSmart2010 software.The result indicated that "open"had a intrinsic semantic prosody in both corpora,however,there was a great difference of the collocates between the two corpora.Then,the author analyzed the characteristics of the collocates of "open" in CECCHD.It turned out that mainly affected by mother tongue interference and intralanguage,collocates in CECCHD could be divided into three types:typical collocation,interlanguage collocation and unusual collocation.Finally,based on the Prototype Theory,the author induced that there were 12 verbal meanings of "open" in virtue of the retrieved items,among which,’"to make open" was the prototype meaning and others were the extensive meanings.Then,from three perspectives of image schema,metaphor and metonymy,the inner connections among senses of "open" were explored as well as the semantic network.To sum up,this research conducted a relatively comprehensive analysis of the polysemous word "open",which is,to some extend,of great significance to vocabulary learning:first,it is helpful to study word combinations idiomatically and naturally in virtue of semantic prosody.Second,in virtue of image schema,metaphor and metonymy,learners can more vividly master the inner connections of extensive meanings of a polysemous word and how these meanings extended from each other.