Even with the maturity of Syntax, there are still plenty of linguistic phenomena that cannot be explained appropriately and completely by syntactic analysis; the most obvious case among them, for example, is polysemy in relation to language expression. Language, as a vehicle of human thoughts and a cognitive processing of externality, is not fully constrained to linguistic rules that has already been discovered and induced. Cognitive Linguistics in the 1990s, however, provides an innovative perspective of language and approach of syntactic analysis. This dissertation employs views of Cognitive Linguistics to explore polysemy in quantity expression by contrastive analysis between Chinese and Japanese.
This dissertation is divided into 12 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces research motivation, purpose, scope, methodology, and literature review on polysemy in quantity expression. Chapter 2 depicts the conceptions of language from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistic, and explores its theories and concepts. Chapter 3 examines concepts in relation to quantity expression. Chapter 4, 5, 6 consecutively analyze polysemy in individual quantity as well as the number of times of operation, and Chapter 7, focuses on that in ordinal number calculation. Chapter 8 explores cognitions in units of interval quantity. Chapter 9 examines the phenomenon that speakers’ cognitive attitudes influence the outcome of quantitative counting to manifest the influence of cognitive factors on interpreting polysemy in quantity expression. This part also tries to point out analytical weaknesses in previous researches. The following Chapter 10 examines cognitive impression of quantity three. Chapter 11 examines how encyclopedic knowledge constrains comprehension of polysemy in expression. Lastly, Chapter 12 concludes this research and brings up prospects for the future.
Examples of polysemy in quantity expression, as discussed in this dissertation, all lie in cognitive grammar category. The diversity in speakers’ interpretations of the same quantity expression, attributable to the situation that speakers have different targets of attention and thus different cognition scopes, leads to the employment of different cognitive processing and interpretations in quantity expression. Therefore, cognitive factors are essential in explaining polysemy in quantity expression. On the other hand, the importance of cognitive competence is much featured by the fact that polysemy, commonly found in our daily life, does not actually prevent people from making reasonable judgment on the meaning of sentences, which allows conversation to proceed without difficulties.