원형 이론에 근거한 다의어의 의미 구조 분석: eye, head와 give를 중심으로 하여

An Analysis of Structures of Polysemous Words through Prototype Theory: eye, head and give

Linguistic expressions can be called products of categorization or external realization of categorization as it is by the cognitive ability that human beings can handle the infinite objects and phenomena of the world by the finite linguistic material. Based on the close relationship between linguistic expressions and the cognitive ability of categorization, this paper aims to examine the semantic structures and the mechanism of semantic extension of polysemous words through the framework of one of the main theories for categorization, prototype theory. According to the analysis through prototype theory, various meanings or uses of eye, head, and give are acquired by a gradual extension from the very prototypical uses to less prototypical uses, that is, from the semantic field of concreteness to the one of abstractness. This paper also shows that metaphor and metonymy play important roles as the mechanism of semantic extension. Though prototype theory has several problems such as arbitrariness in dividing variety of uses into 'center and periphery' or 'prototypical uses and non-prototypical uses' and definition of a word, its systematic account for structures of polysemous words and the mechanism of semantic extension is still proved to be advantageous.