2。 Literature Review

When we turn to any English or Chinese dictionary, we will find the high-frequent occurrence of lexical polysemy。 As a pervasive semantic phenomenon in language, polysemy has attracted much attention from both linguists and philosophers。

There are many researches on polysemy, especially in the light of linguistics, literature and psychology。 Many linguistic schools have studied polysemy in history。 They focus on the external cause of polysemy’s formation and the relation between polysemous words and homonyms。 The traditional focus of polysemy researches is formalism and structural studies which offer different approaches to explore its forming and function。 We need to refer to Aristotelian perspective, which indicates that one entity is a conceptual category。 Polysemy refers to multiple meanings of the words which have been explored since a long time ago。 Wang Yin explained in his work that polysemy can be explored by three stages, namely philological, traditional semantics and modern semantics。 (Wang 22-24) However, all these research involved little to the essence of polysemy。 It is necessary for us to pay more attention to the formation and features of this phenomenon。

3。 Cognitive Research on Polysemy

 We are surrounded by various objects with colors or appearances。 But there is no difficulty for us to name them。 From the perspective of cognitive knowledge, the pision is essentially the process of categorization, which is the fundamental to other cognitive activities。 Prototype is one of the major approaches to categorization。 Several semantic methods like metaphor and metonymy which are based on prototype have undergone the internal changes of semantic categories。 In the meantime, family resemblances restrict the semantic association among categorical members。 

3。1 Prototype in Polysemy

Wittgenstein's family resemblance triggers challenge to Aristotelian Model。 After that Brent and Paul found that there is a focal color in color category, and people categorize color based on the focal color。 This is the beginning study of prototype。 

Prototype is the most typical one in a category and the others have different degree of typicality。 For example, when it comes to the concept FRUIT, people may firstly come up with apple instead of tomato which also can be treated as fruit。 The prototypic fruit is apple so we can say apple is the prototype of category FRUIT。 When a polysemy word firstly coined, it may have only one meaning。 Many new members can be invited to expand the categories without changing the whole semantic structure of categories。 This is why many old words have new meanings。 That a semantic category can be a complex category of meaning set has been revealed by Wittgenstein’s study。 文献综述

Polysemy is one of the semantic relations of correlated semantics in a category。 Prototypical approach deals with polysemy in a cognitive system。 According to Lakoff, words are supposed to be seen as conceptual categories。 They are associated with a series of concepts instead of a single one。 In the view of cognitive linguistics, semantic category of polysemy is the production of cognitive concepts。 What’s more, a word can indicate several different objects with some similarities。 The fuzziness of categorization is shown as vagueness of words。 Take the word “face” as an example:  Word “face” has dozens of meanings in a dictionary, and seven of them are shown as follow。 

(1) the front of the head   

(2) an expression that is shown on somebody’s face 

(3) a surface of a thing 

(4) the appearance; outward aspect 

(5) dignity; self-respect 

(6) the functional surface of a tool 

(7) the topography of an area 

FACE emerges as a conceptual category with seven senses。 The first meaning, the front of the head, serves as the prototype of “face” because it holds all the discrete attributes。 All these meanings are related with each other。 Meaning b is pided from meaning a, and also the source for a further extension to meaning c。 The last one is apparently a meaning near to the boundary of this category。 Learners have to encounter many difficulties when learning a second language。