英汉多义词对比与分析.doc

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临临沂大学
毕业论文

英汉多义词对比与分析
——以“head”和“头、首”为例

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2016年10月18日

A Brief Analysis of the Differences and Similarities of Polysemy in Chinese and English
——Taking “Head” and “头、首” for Example

A Thesis Submitted
to Foreign Languages School of
Linyi University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Bachelor of Art

October, 2016

Acknowledgments
I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the teachers and friends who have offered me all kinds of help in accomplishing this thesis.
First of all, I am extremely indebted to Lu Jianru, my supervisor, whose constant encouragement and illuminating guidance have motivated me at various stages of development of this thesis.
I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the teachers in Foreign Languages School of Linyi University, to whom I owe much of my knowledge in linguistics, literature and academic writing during my four-year study. They are Wang Xiaojun, Jiang Zhaozi and Han Miaomiao. Without their earnest teaching and invaluable lectures during the past four years, the completion of this thesis would have been unimaginable.
In addition, I am also grateful to my classmates, who have offered assistance and support during my graduate students.

Abstract
The English word “head” and Chinese word “头、首”, as basic human words, are equal polysemy in the two languages. From the perspective of metaphor and metonymy, taking “head” and “头、首” for example, after referring to a large number data, this thesis makes an comparison in two aspects, the entity function and the language function. By contrast, we can discover that English and Chinese word derivations have some similarities in cognitive respects and some differences in social culture and the denominal verbs aspects. These differences can be explained respectively from the perspective of cognition, culture and language. The author proposes four kinds of polysemy acquisition strategies to help us to learn and use Chinese and English words.
Key Words: Metonymy; Metaphor; Polysemy

摘要
英语词 “head” 和汉语词 “头、首” 为对等的基本人体词，均属一词多义。本文主要从隐喻与转喻的角度，在查阅大量材料的基础上，以 “head”和 “头、首” 为例，通过对其语言和实体功能的对比，可以发现：英汉词义派生在基本认知方面相类似，在涉及社会文化方面和名动转用方面存在差异。这些异同可以分别从认知、文化及语言角度来加以解释。作者还提出了四种多义词习得策略帮助我们更好地学习和使用英汉词汇。
关键词: 转喻，隐喻，一词多义

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
摘要 iii
Table of Contents iv
Chapter One Introduction 1
Chapter Two The Theoretical Premises 2
2.1 The Development of Polysemy. 2
2.2 Metaphor and Polysemy 3
2.3 Metonymy and Polysemy 4
Chapter Three A Contrastive Study of “head” and “头、首” 6
3.1.The Entity Function Comparison. 6
3.2 The Language Function Comparison. .7
Chapter Four Polysemy Acquisition Strategies 9
4.1 Building a Polysemy Network. 9
4.2 Highlighting the Core Meanings 9
4.3 Combining with the Specific Context 10
4.4 Paying Attention to Cultural Cognitive Differences 10
Chapter Five Conclusion 12
References 13

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临沂大学外国语学院本科毕业论文
Chapter One Introduction
The cognitive linguistics believes: “The ancients often start from life and society, relying on the originally empirical intuitive thinking to know things and its basic ideas are the unity of subject and object.”(Gu, 2000, p: 2) The human body is the most familiar things. The cognitive structure of human body will inevitably be mapped to the cognitive understanding of the concept of the objects and things. People familiarize themselves with the body structure and experience as the basis of cognitive and starting point.
Polysemy is a communist phenomenon both in English and Chinese languages. The research on it is an important subject about vocabulary. As we known, language is monosemous in its beginning, only a word with one meaning. Later with the development of the society and the expansion of people’s communication skills and to meet the need of the increasingly development of communication range, a language symbol will have two or more than two meanings. Polysemy phenomenon is the result of man’s cognitive development, but also to meet the need of language economy principle.
Metonymy and metaphor are two major types of word meaning extension. This article is about the research on cognitive metonymy and metaphor by analysis of “head” both in English and Chinese. We will research these questions: Firstly, How did “head” and “头、首” develop from monosemy to polysemy? Secondly, Are there any similarities or differences in their meanings? Thirdly, If differences are identified, what are the underlying causes leading to phenomenon.

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Chapter Two The Theoretical Premises
2.1 The Development of Polysemy
The development of word meaning from monosemy to polysemy follows two courses. Radiation, which is to say the meaning derived from the basic meaning like rays of light (original meaning) to the surrounding meaning, and each meaning is relatively independent. (Shao, 1994, p. 46-49)
5
3
1
2
6
4

E.g. Neck
(1) That part of the garment;
(2) The neck of an animal used as food;
(3) A narrow part between the head and body or base of any object. e.g. the neck of a violin;
(4) The narrowest part of any thing: bottle, land, strait or channel.
Concatenation, which is a type that after a meaning deriving from the basic meaning, and then another meaning derives from the second meaning, while the first meaning and the third have nothing related.
1
2
3
4
3

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E.g. Candidate
(1) White-robed;
(2) Office seeker in white gowns;
(3) A person who seeks an office;
(4) A person proposed for a place, award, etc.
The traditional linguistic believe metaphor and metonymy are two forms of rhetoric in the language. The cognitive linguistics thinks that metaphor and metonymy are powerful tools for conceptualization and understanding of the abstract category. (Ungerer &Schmid, 2001, p. 231)
2.2 Metaphor and Polysemy
Metaphor involves the comparison of two concepts in that one is constructed in terms of the other. It’s often described in terms of a target domain and a source domain. “The target domain is the experience being described by the metaphor and source domain is the means that we use in order to describe” (Hu, 2001, p. 136). For example, “We’re wasting our time here”. This sentence is based on a metaphor “TIME IS MONEY”. In the target domain, time is conceptualized in terms of the source domain of money. Very often, abstract experiences are described in terms of more concrete ones. In cognitive linguistics, metaphors are represented by a simple formula: “X is Y”, that “X” is the target domain and “Y” is the source domain.
The essence of metaphor is conceptualization. People often rely on simple and concrete concept to understand abstract and complex concepts for metaphorical cognition. Metaphor is pervasive in our daily life; it exists not only in language, but also exists in our thinking and behavior. In our life, people first know something easy to perceive, intuitive and concrete, then by association, combining with some concrete or abstract things. At last they will find their similarity, which causes the mapping between two domains and new meaning. According to cognitive linguistics, metaphor is the mapping between different cognitive domains, the understanding of one thing based on understanding another thing, so the similarity plays an important role in the
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development process of the metaphorical meaning. Metaphor uses similarities of things to find out the relevance of known and new things, thus using the known objects as new things, which produces a projection between the old and the new things in two cognitive domains, and then puts a concept domain into another concept domain. In the semantic category, the concrete meaning is developed into abstract meaning.
Word “face”, means “front of your head”, such as “she has such a pretty face”. According to this meaning, “face” can be used to refer to “the front, upper, outer part of something”, For example, “the face of a clock”, “the face of a building”. “Face” can also refer to “a person's dignity or honor”, such as “save face”, “lose face”. “Face” can also be used to refer to “expression”, for example, “make a face”. In addition, “face” is also used to refer to “deal with difficult situations”, such as “face the reality”, etc. There are many polysemies like “face”, which use the correlation between things through metaphorical thinking and give a new meaning of old words.(Yu, 2010, p. 254-264)
2.3Metonymy and Polysemy
“Metonymy, in the cognitive literature is defined as a cognitive process in which the vehicle provides mental access to the target within the same domain” (Hu, 2011, p.137).
In metonymy, the whole part is highlighted by using protrusive, perceptive and memorable part or a cognitive process which the part is replaced by the perceptible the whole part. Metonymy and metaphor are two different cognitive styles. The main difference is that: metaphor is based on the similarity principle, a projection between different cognitive domains, while metonymy is based on the principle of proximity, reflecting the same cognitive domain of two correlated elements. Proximity is another principle that people know things, namely, cognitive psychology tends regard the adjacent two components as a unit. The specific performance is when you want to know a thing you can refer to another correlated and similar thing. Some common useful form includes form replacing content, the part replacing the whole par, etc. For
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example, the sentence: “The kettle is boiling often”, actually refers to the “The water in the kettle is boiling”. Another example, “more hands are needed to finish this work”, “hands” here not only refers to the human hand, it means more people. In addition, there are some expressions of adjacent relation of metonymy. For example: “I like reading Shakespeare”, “the taxis are on strike”. In this sentence, “Shakespeare” refers to the works of Shakespeare; “taxi” refers to a taxi driver. By metonymy, the lexical meaning is extended and expanded, and human languages become more rich and colorful.

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Chapter Three A Contrastive Study of “head”和“头、首”
Our research started with consulting many relevant dictionaries, merging of superfine meanings, deleting some of the more professional, and at last built a set of more basic relatively independent meanings as the analytic framework of our study.
3.1 The Entity Function Comparison

意义
英语
汉语
A.头部
headache
首：昂首挺胸
头：头盔
B.头发
headband
头：头型
C.整个人
＄15 a head
头：头头儿
D.脑筋（智力,思维）
Above/over one ‘head
头：头脑
E.物体的顶端或末梢
The head of the lake
首：首尾
头：山头儿
F.事情的起点、开端或终点
The head of the table

头：话头儿
G.方面
Speech arranged under five heads
头：心挂两头
H.量词
Fifty head of cattle
头：五十头牛

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A.头部
C.整个人
D.脑筋
M
M.E
B.头发
G.方面
M
M
E.物体的顶端或末梢
F.事情起点、开端、或终点
M
M.E
H.量词
M
M＝metaphor
me＝metonymy

(1)Similarities: We can find common meanings in the eight comparisons; it shows the consistency between English and Chinese. It also proves that “As long as many languages take images from the physiological basis and the image structure is often similar” (Croft, &Cruse, 2006, p.98).
(2) Differences:
i. Disyllable is a phenomenon in Chinese. “儿” is a typically phenomenon in
Chinese, as a double syllable pattern which has no meaning.
ii. Chinese “头” can be seen as a nominal classifier, which is not existent in English. It is because that Chinese accustomed to use nouns with nominal classifiers. And there is a great deal of nominal classifiers, however, English people use qualifiers less.
3.2 The Language Function Comparison
意义
英语
汉语
I.朝着，面向
Head for the town

J.负责
The minister headed the committee.

K.正面相撞
A head-on crash

L正视某问题加以解决
Tackle a problem head

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L.正视某问题加已解决
M
K.正面相撞
M
I.朝着，面向

M

A.头部

M.E
M
J.负责
C.整个人

“Head” has four meanings as a verb, while Chinese have no verb meaning. This is not accidental but typically reflects the characteristics of Chinese and English It is frequently that nouns are used as verbs while notional words and the double syllable pattern are immobilized in modern Chinese, which inhibit the flexibility of words and accordingly Composite structure is used.(Zhou, 2000, P. 16)

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Chapter Four Polysemy Acquisition Strategies
Through analyzing the internal cognitive mechanism of polysemy, we think that cognitive theory will help to guide the student to carry on the polysemous word acquisition. Explanation of polysemy from the perspective of cognition and development can help students clearly understand the development of different meanings of words, and you can know the polysemous word meanings between different relationships. On this basis, this paper puts forward the tactic to help the students better learn words.
4.1 Building a Polysemy Network
By metaphor and metonymy mechanism, Polysemy expands from basic meaning to extension word and metaphoric meaning, and many other different meanings. According to polysemous word meaning extension way, we can generalize the different meanings of polysemous word and teach after finishing the meanings of order. It can make the cumbersome polysemy senses become simple and more convenient to students’ memory. Teachers in the process of teaching words should give the students to explain the internal relations between various meanings, making the students to form the semantic categories of words in the brain network as a whole. Taking “head” for example，we can find these expressions：Head of lake，head of page，head of government，use your head，Two heads are better than one。
Through the analysis we found that these meanings are “head” of specific extension and expansion, from the concrete “head” to realize it is in the highest position of human body. It is the start point, the most important part of the human Body. Human thinking activities are controlled by “mind”, the central nervous system. So there will be more than one extension of the meanings. Students understand the links between the various meanings will form in your mind a clear semantic network diagram, thus improve the efficiency of learning.
4.2 Highlighting the Core Meanings
At first each term is used by people in just monosemous, along with the
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development of the language gradually gain more new meaning. The prototype category theory in cognitive linguistics believes that th