英语论文网

ure we have had a full grasp of a newword. Traditionally speaking, to know a new word is to make clear of its orthography,pronunciation and dictionary meaning. However, the knowledge of these is far frombeing enough to master a word. Due to the deficiency of traditional ways of learning anew word, the present study provides a new angle of vocabulary teaching and learningand employs a new theory of words and language—lexical priming as an explanationof collocation, colligation, semantic pReference, semantic prosody, cohesive links,semantic relations, and textual organization, etc.The thesis is an attempt to investigate polysemy from a different perspective ofLexical Priming Theory, aiming to reveal the collocational, colligational, semantic,pragmatic and textual characteristics of the polyseme devotion in a morecomprehensive and persuasive manner. The materials exploited are not based onintuition which will be naturally subjective. Instead, the data collected from BNCavailable online are abundant, authentic and objective enough for researchers to arriveat a sound conclusion. More importantly, the present study reports an attempt todiscover similarities and differences in the lexical priming features among senses ofthis polyseme and also seeks to gain insights into how the study of Lexical PrimingTheory sheds light upon teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language(EFL).
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Polysemy
Etymologically, polysemy was born from Greek word polysemia [polys-- (many)+ sema (sign)], which means that a polyseme is the one that has multiple senses. Here,polysemes are those words in a language that equip themselves more than onemeaning. To tell the truth, it is the French scholar Bréal who coined this technicalterm polysemy in the year 1897. In the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language byCrystal, he defines polysemy as the following: “Polysemy refers to cases in whichlexis has over one meaning. It is a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexicalitem that has a range of different meanings” (Crystal, 2003: 106). According toStephen Ullmann (1957), polysemy, in synchronistic terms, means that one word canhave more than one sense. To put it an alternative way, words have varied but relatedmeanings. For another, from the viewpoint of Fromkin and Rodman (1998), polysemyis a linguistic phenomenon in which words have multiple meanings that are connectedin a conceptual or historical manner. In reality, it is not a simple thing to delimitpolysemy as made above. Just the opposite, it still remains an issue of contention inmodern linguistics. Until now, there has been no unanimous criterion for polysemyyet in the linguistic study. Alternatively, we can say that there has not been a generalenough definition that includes all features of polysemy. Broadly speaking, however,it is one linguistic form featured with several or multiple senses that are related in oneway or another.
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2.2 Major Approaches to Researching Polysemy
In this section, the study provides a brief overview of the varied fortunes ofpolysemy research from the time when it was made popular by Michel Bréal (Bréal,1924, cited in Bréal, 1897). When conducting research on polysemy, Ullmann (1957),following the development of Bréal, resorts to the means of classical lexical semanticsfrom a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Five decades after Ullmann