A Cross-Linguistic Case Study of Chinese and English “Eye”: Cognitive Semantics as Approach
Abstract
Cognitive semantics has gained increasing attention from linguists who are into polysemy and trying to figure out the relations of multiple senses possessed by a single word. Exisiting studies emphasise bodily experience’s effects on language users’ perception and conceptualisation of entities around them and consider body-part as the core of embodiment. However, there is limited research on systematic and detailed analysis of cross-linguistic similarities and differences that can provide insights into how language users with diverse culture backgrounds perceive a particular organ and create experiential similarities between the concrete body part and abstract concepts. This study takes the case of eye as the pointcut to investigate both the shared semantic meanings and discreancies in Chinese and English. Dictionary and corpus are employed as two data sources for extracting lingusitic instantiations of stablised senses and contextual senses to address the problem in a comprehensive manner. The results suggest that prototypical sense acts as a bond to connect most extended senses in both languages and some cross-linguistic similarities exist in extension strategies, whereas discrepancies do occur with the intervention of culture. This research sheds light on some underlying mechanisms of cross-linguistic understanding and sense making process by virtue of exploring “eye” as a polysymy.
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