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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Polysemy, a natural and universal linguistic phenomenon almost seen in everylanguage, has long been the focus in the study of word meaning by many researchersat home and abroad. The term “polysemy” first appeared in 1897 in Michael Breal’sbook named Fundamental Essai de Semantique (Nerlich et al., 2003). According toBreal, who is known as the founder of semantics, polysemy is an outcome of semanticchange and it is the lexical semantic change synchronically. Besides, he distinguishesvarious kinds of polysemy as well, using the types of sematic relations between theold sense(s) and the new one(s) as criteria. Polysemy, according to Ullmann (1957), insynchronistic terms, means that one word can have more than one sense. Bolinger,however, contends that the natural phenomenon of language should be one form withone meaning or vice versa (Hopper & Traugott, 2003). Based upon his opinion, aperfect language should be one that the meaning in each and every word is definitewithout any other possible meanings. However, such language is far from beingpossible and practical as human’s brain cannot cover so many meanings in which oneword with only one meaning. As a consequence, the phenomenon of polysemy isinevitable and unavoidable. To put it another way, many words possess a uniquephysical representation with more than one sense or meaning. In English, for instance,it has been estimated that over 40% of words have more than one meaning (Britton,1978). This, undoubtedly, pushes researchers to pay more attention to the study ofpolysemy.A wide range of perspectives and approaches have been conducted on polysemy.The most widely known are traditional approach and cognitive approach. Thetraditional semantic study, such as Naming Theory, the Theory of Semiotic Triangle,Katz and Fordor’s (1963) Componential Analysis and Trier’s (1931) Semantic FieldTheory, laid emphasis on the linguistic system itself, but ignored the people’s ownknowledge of the world which included people’s interactions with the world andvarious mental activities, and thus failed to uncover the essence of the phenomenon ofpolysemy. Due to the deficiency of traditional research on polysemy, cognitiveapproach came into being. The theories within cognitive linguistics that are applicable to the investigation of polysemy include Frame Semantics Theory, Prototype Theory,Categorization Theory and Family Resemblance Theory and the like. The CognitiveSemantics is relative to the conceptual content and the organization of language. Thefeatures of Cognitive Semantics are that language competence is a part of people’scognitive abilities. Therefore, we can’t take language as a completely self-governedsystem. As a matter of fact, the structures of language are intimately related tohuman’s experience and the functions of their utterances. Meanings are not onlyinvolved with objective truth conditions, but also correlated with people’s subjectiveconsciousness and the infinite knowledge system as well. From the features of thecognitive approach, it seems that this kind of approach has greatly supplemented thetraditional study on polysemy. However, this approach does not pay adequateattention to the restriction for a lexical item being polysemous.
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1.2 Research Objectives
Polysemy, a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon that is seen in almost each andevery language, is a good place to start to make s