A Cognitive Study On The Polysemy Of Chinese Verb Pao

The polysemous word embodies the economic principle of language.When a word appears at the beginning,it often contains only one meaning.However,as time goes by and social progress continues,new things continue to emerge,which results in new language words and expressive methods,leading to lexical meaning expansion or extension.As to the development and change of lexical meaning,traditional lexical semantics tends to attribute the meaning change to historical and social factors.Those historical and social factors can only explain the necessity of the meaning change,while cognitive factors can explain the internal mechanism and possibility of the meaning change.As a kind universal phenomenon of human language,polysemy reflects people's cognitive regularities.The extended word meaning is closely related to human's understanding of and interaction with the outside world,and is the result of human cognition.Cognitive theories can explore the forming method from the internal structure of a polysemous word,and have more interpretive force for the formation and development of polysemous words.Cognitive research has opened up a new perspective for the research of polysemy.Polysemy is one of the important topics in the study on cognitive lexical semantics,and the linking method among senses of a polysemous word is also the focus and difficulty in polysemy study.Recently,to explain polysemy from the cognitive perspective has been more and more popular,including using the prototype category to analyze polysemous words and exploring the relations between polysemy and metaphor or metonymy.There are also some explanations for polysemy from the image schematic perspective.However,this kind of study mainly focuses on prepositions.In fact,as a universal cognitive phenomenon and ability of people,image schema has universal explanatory force.This thesis takes the Chinese verb Pao as the case study,and tries to explore the following questions based on the image schema1theory: 1)What is the manifestation of the Chinese verb Pao's polysemy network? 2)Which image schema is involved in each sense of Pao? 3)What is the linking method among these senses of Pao?Through analyzing the explanation in the dictionary and the usage in the corpus of the polysemous verb Pao,this thesis summarizes more than 10 different senses of the spatial motion verb Pao and studies those different senses by applying the image schema theory.Finally,it is found that the polysemy network of the verb Pao is a radiating structure centered upon Pao's central sense(“Move quickly”).Several image schemas are involved in those different senses of Pao,and there is a one-to-many relationship between the image schema and a single sense.According to the analysis in this thesis,it is summarized that there are three image schemas involved in the polysemy network of Pao: PATH image schema(S1,S3),ATTRACTION-PATH image schema(S2)and CONTAINER-PATH image schema(S4,S5).The sense “Move quickly” of Pao has the most connections with other senses,and is taken as the basic or central sense in the polysemy network.And correspondingly,the Path image schema which is involved in the basic sense is regarded as the basic image schema.In addition,this article also analyzes the linking method among Pao's different senses,that is,metonymy,metaphor,co-hyponymic analogy and specialization.