An English-Chinese Contrastive Study on Polysemous Networks of HEART
英汉"心"的多义网络对比

Both heart in English and xin in Chinese are cases of polysemy, referring primarily to the same organ in the human body. This study displays how people speaking these languages develop their complex polysemous networks in a variety of ways of conceptualization. The meaning extensions of both words are promoted by metonymy and assisted by metaphor and this general tendency typically reflects the human cognitive preference. On the other hand, some minor disparities in extension can be accounted for by inter-cultural and inter-linguistic differences. The present study separates 3 main sense clusters which are shared by Heart and xin.: (1) THINKING, (2) EMOTION and (3) ENTITY. The first cluster is composed of THOUGHT, INTENTION, CONSCIENCE and COURAGE. The second encompasses SENSATION, AFFECTION and TREASURE. And the third includes SUBSTANCE, SHAPE, CENTER and INNER MIND. Metaphoric and metonymic extensions are two main ways in which lexical items derive their senses.The former involves a mapping across different cognitive domains, while the latter is a mapping in one single domain, within which one category is taken as standing for another.Both ways facilitate conceptualization and comprehension. Of the vocabulary, some lexical items derive more metaphoric than metonymic extensions and others the other way around.A specific choice can be motivated and explained in the principle of economy. The present study argues that the extension patterns of heart and xin are more metonymic than otherwise. Even in the case of metaphtonymic extension, metonymic extension occurs first and thus forms the basis. This can be explained in the principle of embodiment.The heart is invisible and therefore intangible, unlike the face, for example, of which it is easy to form a visual image.On the other hand, the heart functions more importantly in bodily metabolism. In terms of frequency and productivity, the two words show disparity.The Chinese HEART, related to ancient philosophy and Buddhism, governs all physical and mental activities and processes of the human body, and even the spiritual world.As a result, xin is a word of high frequency, used either independently as a word or dependently as a bound morpheme.By contrast, the English HEART highlights and specifies its senses of EMOTION, leaving its senses of THINKING in the background.The latter senses are commonly conveyed in English by some other words, such as mind, head and brain.This contrast explains why xin in Chinese is more productive and more frequently used than heart in English. The similarity and disparity examined in this study motivate the polysemous networks cognitively and culturally and partly reveal the complex logistics in language.