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1、 POLYSEMY: FROM COGNITIVE AND PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVES By Yin Xiaopan Under the supervision of Prof. Zhang Ming A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts to the School of Foreign Studies Anhui University April 2009 i Acknowledgements At the completi
2、on of the thesis, I would like to take this chance to express my sincere thanks to those who have helped me in the process of writing this thesis. First of all, I am deeply indebted to my esteemed supervisor, Prof. *, for helping me decide on the subject, checking the draft and providing numerous he
3、lpful comments and suggestions. Without his patient guidance, careful revision and insightful instruction, I would never have been able to bring this thesis into light. I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to all my teachers in Anhui University, who have instructed me during my postgraduate s
4、tudies. Special thanks are extended to Prof. Zhu Yue, Prof. Zhu Xiaomei, Prof. Zhou Fangzhu, Dr. Hu Jian, Dr. Zhang Hongxia and Dr. Yang Ling. Without their inspiring lectures, I would never have had the ability to finish the thesis. My heartfelt thanks also go to my classmates and friends for their
5、 friendship and support. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to my family for their everlasting love and support for my achievement of the dissertation. ii Abstract Polysemy is one of the most pervasive and important semantic phenomena of language. If every word had only one meaning, our lang
6、uage would be chaotic and uneconomic. Although the language is full of polysemy, people seldom have any difficulty in communication with each other. As one of the peculiarities of human speech, polysemy has been proven intractable within the previous approaches of semantic feature analysis, semantic
7、 field theory and truth-conditional theory etc. In these approaches, the studies often ignore the external elements of language, such as human cognitive devices, his experience in the world. Then a conclusion is reached that polysemy is nothing but linguistic coincidence. Since these theories havent
8、 revealed all the features and the essence of polysemy, they cant explain the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy thoroughly and convincingly. The development of cognitive linguistics helps us explain the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy from the perspective of the human subjective interaction with t
9、he objective world. It effectively analyzes the inner relation of various meanings of polysemy, that is, the various meanings of a polyseme are not arbitrary, but motivated, mainly by metaphor and metonymy. Based on the theories of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, this thesis makes a tentative
10、study of polysemy on the aspects of its internal structure, semantic extension mechanism and meaning confirmation in actual usage. Polysemy can be seen as a category, which is embodied by a prototype, and members of the category are connected through family resemblance. Then extension of meanings ta
11、kes place around the prototype which is known as the basic meaning. It is mainly through metaphor and metonymy that the extended meanings come into being. Although there are many meanings in a polyseme, only one of the meanings appears under the restriction of co-text and context. Different meanings
12、 of a polyseme will not appear in the same sentence at one time. Therefore, polysemy will not affect the human expression and understanding of utterance because only one aspect of meanings is triggered in specific context. The iii meaning must have the optimal relevance and the communicators will ma
13、ke efforts to find the relevance. The confirmation of polysemy meaning is triggered by the search for relevance. The thesis is a theoretical analysis of polysemy and the author tries to combine the theories of Cognitive Linguistics and Relevance Theory together so as to answer the following two ques
14、tions: (1) How are word meanings extended to form polysemy? (2) How is a specific meaning settled and confirmed? By solving the two questions, the author finds that the study of polysemy involves not only cognitive effects, but also pragmatic factors. The use and understanding of polysemy is not onl
15、y a semantic and cognitive issue, but also a cognitive-pragmatic issue. The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to the paper wherein the purpose, the significance and the organization of the thesis are expressed. Chapter Two is a literature review, in which polys
16、emy is defined at first, the researches are reviewed on polysemy in the previous approaches, then the problems are pointed out with these approaches to polysemy, and at last reasons are given for presenting the thesis. Chapter Three is an analysis of polysemy from cognitive perspective, which analyzes how the word meanings extend to form polysemy with the help of cognitive theorie
