关键词: 认知语言学教学; 多义词; 语义理据; 策略迁移

Abstract: Taking two groups of non-English major freshmen as the subjects, and over (and its derivatives -- compounds and phrases) as the target words, the quantitative and qualitative empirical study investigates the effectiveness of CL-inspired instructional methods which exploit the notion of semantic motivation and the possibility of translating the insights and principles of CL pedagogy into a strategy for autonomous learning and independently inferring the meanings of novel polysemous words. The findings demonstrate that the CL-inspired pedagogical approach significantly improves the in-depth understanding and meaning retention of the target polysemous words and help the experimented subjects acquire the cognitive strategies which can be transferred to figure out the semantic motivation of polysemous words much better than the controlled group which receives the translation-based instruction. Meanwhile, drawing on such CL theories as construal, image-schema and its transformation, conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending, the CL pedagogy strongly advocates the feasibility of both meaning acquisition and by-product strategies, and the significance of first of all pinning down the core sense of the polysemous words which serves as the starting point to reproduce the other meaning items as the learners’ mental representation of the newly-acquired meaning items is implicitly followed by the core sense representation which aids in appreciation and identification of semantic motivation and application of strategy transfer.