An Analysis of English Polysemous Words from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor- Taking “Hot” for Example

Abstract

With the development of society, people’s requirement on lexical meanings keeps changing, which causes meaning expansion.
And it gives birth to the pervasive phenomenon of polysemy in vocabulary. Conceptual metaphor, proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, is a
significant cognitive device deeply influencing human’s way of thinking and using language. And this thesis focuses on the analysis of con_x005fceptual metaphor mechanism on the polysemous words, “Hot”. Firstly, there is a brief introduction about polysemous words and conceptual
metaphor. Then the most part of thesis focuses on explaining the semantic meanings of “Hot” with the help of conceptual metaphor theory.