The Acquisition Of The Metaphorical Senses Of Perception Verbs By Chinese Learners Of English

Perception verbs are important parts of English vocabulary.The study of perception verbs from the perspective of linguistics mainly focuses on five types of vocabulary,that is visual,auditory,olfactory,tactile senses and the senses of taste.Perception verbs have become more complicated because of the large number of word senses and rich contexts.Thus the acquisition of perception verbs becomes one of the most difficult parts for second language learners.Cognitive linguistics emphasize the motivation of word senses,and of which the conceptual metaphor plays an important role in the extension of the senses of perception verbs.Conceptual metaphor theory is widely used in the empirical study of the acquisition of vocabulary.Researches mainly focus on phrasal verbs,idioms and notional verbs.Linguists have found that conceptual metaphor can explain different senses of polysemous words.It is easier to help students understand the senses and form a semantic network of polysemous words,so as to deepen the memory and get a better learning effect.Therefore,the application of conceptual metaphor theory in the acquisition of metaphorical senses of perception verbs can serve as a breakthrough in research,which can explore whether the theory of cognitive linguistics,especially conceptual metaphor theory,can play an important role in the acquisition of different senses of perception verbs.However,the researches of vocabulary mainly focus on phrasal verbs,idioms and notional verbs,but the researches of the senses of perception verbs are little mentioned.The study aims to answer two research questions: First,what is the difference between the learning effects of the teaching method based on cognitive linguistics and the PPP teaching method on metaphorical senses of perception verbs? Second,the extension of metaphorical senses of perception verbs depends on different conceptual metaphors,and what are the learning effects of these different types of conceptual metaphors on the acquisition of metaphorical senses of perception verbs?As participants of this study,two natural classes of junior students of grade one were selected from Juye Experiment Middle School of Heze,Shandong Province.Class Onewas served as the experimental group and Class Two was served as the control group.All of the subjects had not been trained with cognitive theories before.Fifteen perception verbs were selected and their meanings were divided into three types of metaphorical senses of perception verbs.The extended senses of perception verbs used in the expanding teaching and test procedure were all derived from the Oxford English Dictionary,the Collins English Dictionary(new edition)and the COCA corpus.The teaching method used in the experimental group is the method based on cognitive linguistics,while the teaching method in the control group is the PPP teaching method.The experimental process lasted for six weeks,with one hour of language class per week.Students in the experimental group and in the control group were taught by the same teacher.The empirical study used test paper to collect the relevant data,in which the type of test is gap filling.The final results were analyzed by Independent-Samples T Test and One-Way Within-Groups ANOVA.The experimental results show that:(1)The learning effects of the participants using the teaching methods based on cognitive linguistics are better than that of the students using PPP teaching methods in the learning process of metaphorical senses of perception verbs.It shows that,in the acquisition process of perception verbs,the extension of the metaphorical senses of perception verbs through explanation of the conceptual metaphor theory can help students to understand and memorize senses of vocabulary better.This kind of explanation makes students know the source domain and the target domain of different types of metaphorical senses of perception verbs and let students understand how does the metaphorical senses extended and how does different senses of verbs form a semantic network.Thus students can deepen the impression of metaphorical senses,which may help them learn and remember the vocabulary firmly and get higher academic scores.In other words,the teaching method based on conceptual metaphor theory can help students learn the metaphorical senses of perception verbs and obtain better learning results.(2)There are significant differences in the learning effects of different types of metaphorical senses of perception verbs.In the acquisition of these three different types of metaphorical senses of perception verbs,the learning effects of SEEING IS TOUCHING,EYES ARE LIMBS based on the interpretation of the conceptual metaphor theory are thebest,and that of the type of PERCEPTION IS RECEPTION follow behind while the effects of the type of PSYCHOLOGICAL FORCES ARE PHYSICAL FORCES are the lowest.In conclusion,in the three different types of metaphorical senses of perception verbs,the learning effect of the first type of SEEING IS TOUCHING,EYES ARE LIMBS explained by the conceptual metaphor theory is better.Therefore,this study validates the effective role of conceptual metaphor theory in the process of acquisition of perception verbs,that is,the knowledge of conceptual metaphor theory and the extension mechanism of senses can help students understand the development process of word senses and improve their learning efficiency.There are still some shortcomings of this study,and it is hoped that the future empirical studies can pay more attention to cultivate the metaphorical awareness of students and to find other relevant factors that affect the acquisition of perception verbs,which will further expand the study of perception verbs.