Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research background
“Polysemy is the phenomenon whereby a lexical item is commonly associated withtwo or more meanings that appear to be related in some way” (Evans and Green, 2017:89).It is universally acknowledged that there used to be only one meaning for all words. As thesociety and human cognitive abilities developed, new words have to be created andsometimes new meaning was added to established words thus polysemous words emerged.In English, polysemous words account for an overwhelming majority. Carter pointedthat “the more frequently a word is used, the more polysemous it tends to be” (Carter,1998:67).That is to say polysemous words have become an important part in vocabularyteaching and learning.For English vocabulary teaching and learning in vocational college, teachers andstudents has already realized its significance. However, the important role of polysemouswords teaching and learning hasn’t been paid much attention. They are taught in the sameway as other words with the commonly used definition-example method. In this method,after knowing the pronunciation and spelling of a word, students are given some examplesto show the usage of this word or asked to make sentences about the word. But how thedifferent meanings of the word related with each other is not mentioned at all. It’s difficultfor students to master the usages, or even remember them. For vocational college students,PRETCO(Practical English Test for Colleges) and CET4 are important. In order to passPRETCO and CET4, they need to handle about 4200 words.
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1.2 Significance and purpose of the study
Prototype category theory is a basic and important branch in cognitive linguistics.Since the cognitive oriented method may provide a new view in vocabulary teaching, theimportant role of prototype category theory in vocabulary teaching and learning has beenfocused on recently. Considering the present situation of polysemous words learning andteaching in Chinese vocational colleges, the present research aims to explore a newpolysemous words teaching method based on prototype category theory and arouse theattention to polysemous words teaching and learning. It presents the relationships ofdifferent meanings of a polysemous word from the perspective of cognitive linguistics andguide students to learn the meanings in an efficient way. More importantly, the researchattempts to explore whether the teaching method based on prototype category theory ismore efficient in facilitating students’ memorization of polysemous words than thetraditional teaching method and whether the students’ ability of guessing polysemouswords can be developed by the method.Many researches have been conducted on vocabulary teaching in the past years, andmany satisfactory results were got. However, the teaching methods for polysemous wordshaven’t been explored enough. So this paper attempts to apply cognitive theory, prototypecategory theory to polysemous words teaching to explore a new and efficient way forpolysemous words teaching.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Category theory
Category is an important term in cognitive linguistics. It underlies the use of languageand words in general. Since producing and understanding language undoubtedly inv，英语论文题目，英语毕业论文
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