The Polysemous Analysis Of GET From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

The study of polysemy based on cognitive linguistics has become one of the hot topics in vocabulary research.Literature reviews show that previous studies on polysemy in the perspective of cognitive linguistics mainly focus on nouns such as heart,hand,head,but the research on verbs is rare.Therefore,this study selects GET as research subject and adopts the theory of conceptual metaphor,image schema,trajector and landmark as well as idealized cognitive model to study the polysemy of GET.This paper is based on the case study research as well as the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis.Firstly,the author collects 25 meanings from Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary(7th edition,2009),Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary(1st edition,2010),Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English(1st edition,2004),Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners(1st edition,2003),Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary of English(1st edition,2009),The English-Chinese Dictionary(2nd edition,2007).In terms of theories of cognitive linguistics,all the meanings are divided into literal meaning and metaphorical meaning,including 1 basic meaning,13 elaborations and 11 metaphorical meanings.what’s more,all the elaborations fall into 5 categories.This study shows that basic meaning is the core and the most typical meaning.Elaborations are derived from basic meaning with slight changes.Metaphorical meanings extend from basic one in a metaphorical way.By contrast,basic meaning and elaborations are concrete,and metaphorical meanings are more abstract.Then,the author extracts 2500 lines at random from BNC to study the frequency of use.The result shows that literal meanings are the most frequently used ones and metaphorical meanings are less used than literal ones.This paper proves that meaning extensions of GET are obtained through cognitive methods such as image schema and metaphor on the basis of basic meaning,and it further validates the theory of cognitive linguistics.Each meaning of a word is the result of human beings’ experience in the objective world during the diachronic development of language.Then it is concluded that human’s knowledge about the world is based on the philosophy of experience and they usually uses known and familiar things to perceive and understand unknown things.