Essays on Polysemy

Prototype is the characteristic instance of any category, so the concept of it helps to explain the meanings of the word in terms of comparing the words with the closest examples. Prototype is the best representative of cognitive or linguistic category. The theory of prototypes developed in parallel in cognitive psychology, ethnolinguistics, semantics, cognitive anthropology, and philosophy. As well as many linguistic theories, which roots go back to psychological or philosophical teachings prototypical semantics owes intensive development and experimentation in the field of cognitive psychology, the result of which was the theory of prototypes and prototypical representations about the ...

As a branch of linguistics, rhetoric widely involves all areas of the humanities and social science. And rhetoric with the moderate slogan is a hot topic in today's study of advertising language art. (Shimizu, Koichi, 2003) This paper analyzes the relationship between advertisement and language, and then discusses the application of all kinds of rhetoric in advertising language, showing the important role of rhetoric in advertising. Advertisements often rhetorically use the method of words, sentence patterns, and various figures of speech. This paper offers an assiduous rhetorical analysis of two real-life advertisements, together with a comparison and contrast. It ...

Literary work forms one of the major cultural influences and expressions of any society. Through literature, a society can posit its position on various issues and can attempt to influence others to see issues from their perspectives. Under such circumstances, any appreciation of a piece of literature requires the reader critically to examine the underlying structure that has influenced the writer. It is while viewing a piece of work with reference to the author that two major continental approaches arise. In structuralism, the various element of people’s culture (including literature) are viewed with reference to a larger over-arching system or structures. While ...

Puns and Riddles in School-Aged Children

I went to my neighborhood to observe the school aged children. They were children from kindergarten to grade two. Their ages were ranging from two to seven years, and six among them were girls; while four were boys. I asked them many riddles, pun on words, and recorded the following information. A pun is a funny application of word/words that have similar sounds, but are changed in meaning; or simply call it a play with words. Homonyms and polysemy is used in puns to make them humorous as homonyms are words having same sounds and lexical polysemy is about having ...

Learning a language can be quite troublesome for a novice, however with time and practice the fluency and sentence construction comes automatically without making a conscious effort. A small mispronunciation or a fuzzy structure of the sentence can lead to a complete change of meaning of the entire sentence and therefore it is important to maintain current collaboration of words, grammar and sentence structure. It may be easy to interpret the meaning just by knowing the words however the actual sentence is constructed only once all the words and related grammar falls into place. For example, the words ‘Sun, ‘Rises’ and ‘East’, may be ...