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Cognitive linguistics provides a brand-new perspective to the study on polysemy.It is no longer restricted to the internal structures of languages, but involves theinternal cognitive mechanism of human beings as well as the external bodyexperiences with the outside world.Among all those underlying cognitive mechanisms, metaphorical andmetonymical thinking of human beings have drawn great attention. The publication ofMetaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) proves to be a significant landmarkin the cognitive approach to language and thought in which it clearly states thatmetaphor is far more than a rhetoric device but instead is an underlying mechanism bymeans of which people perceive, reason and conceptualize. In a word, it is a way ofthinking and conceptualizing. According to them, metaphor is grounded in our bodilyexperience – the one that we human beings interact directly with the immediatephysical environment. Thus, it seems to be obvious that we experience the objectiveworld first then form a new idea through metaphorical thinking. It is possible that weare able to understand the complex and abstract concepts on the basis of our previousexperiences, and the experience itself provides groundwork in the process of creatinga new world.Considering the impossibility of coining new words every time when humanbeings face a new object or situation, to give a new meaning to the already-existingwords is the most economical way to meet constantly increasing needs for linguisticexpressions. And, when the already-existing word gains a new meaning and the newmeaning coexists with the old meaning, we say the word is polysemized. Traditionalsemantic theories are confined to giving explanations for polysemy. However, thecognitive linguistic points of view, mainly metonymical and metaphorical thoughts,provide systematic explanations for the working mechanisms of polysemy. Accordingto Lakoff (1987: 13), “Polysemy arises from the fact that there are systematicrelationships between different cognitive models and between elements of the samemodel”.Regarding the fact that people conceptualize through metonymical andmetaphorical mapping concrete experiences onto abstract ones, along with thecustomized economic way of creating new meaning, the appearance of body metaphorcomes naturally. In any languages across the world, there are many body metaphors,and many scholars have made attempts to give full explanations for the differentsenses of body metaphors.This thesis, based on some established theories from cognitive linguisticsperspectives, attempts to make a tentative study on the polysemous Chinese word“手” and the English word “Hand”, aiming to compare semantic senses of these twopolysemous words and the underlying mechanisms for semantic extension in terms ofcross-cultural aspects. Hand, as the most active and dexterous part of the body, is oneof the most important tools in dealing with the surroundings around us. Grounded inthe theory of experimentalism, words with “Hand” provide an effective way inunderstanding the idea of “bodily experience” and the universal underlyingmechanism in cognition.Idioms are not only pervasive in language, they are also a special linguistic formconcentrating human intelligence. Deriving from metaphor, metonymy, conventionalknowledge or the combination of any of them, they manifest a way of thinking in theprocess of creating a new semantic sense. Therefore, this th本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。