| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | 第1-5页 |
| Abstract in Chinese | 第5-7页 |
| Abstract in English | 第7-13页 |
| 1. Introduction | 第13-20页 |
| ·General understanding of polysemy | 第14-16页 |
| ·Polysemy | 第14-15页 |
| ·Polysemy and homonymy | 第15-16页 |
| ·Problems of polysemy in theory and practice | 第16-18页 |
| ·Aims of the study and related methods | 第18-19页 |
| ·The organization of the whole thesis | 第19-20页 |
| 2. Literature Review | 第20-36页 |
| ·Historical stages of polysemy study | 第20页 |
| ·Traditional approaches to polysemy study | 第20-26页 |
| ·The naming theory | 第22页 |
| ·Historical comparative linguistics | 第22-23页 |
| ·The theory of semiotic triangle | 第23-24页 |
| ·Componential analysis (CA) | 第24-26页 |
| ·Cognitive approach to polysemy study | 第26-35页 |
| ·A brief survey of cognitive semantics | 第26-34页 |
| ·The new interpretation of polysemy | 第34-35页 |
| ·Summary | 第35-36页 |
| 3. Methodology | 第36-42页 |
| ·Former studies of polysemy within cognitive semantics mode | 第36-38页 |
| ·Previous cognitive studies of polysemy and methods | 第36-37页 |
| ·The limitations of the previous studies | 第37-38页 |
| ·Explanation of the choice of words in the case study | 第38-39页 |
| ·Corpus-based approach and the corpus used in the paper | 第39-41页 |
| ·Definition of corpus | 第39页 |
| ·Corpus used in the thesis | 第39-41页 |
| ·Plan of the research | 第41-42页 |
| 4. Sense networks of polysemous words: a case study | 第42-56页 |
| ·Heart in English and its sense structure | 第42-47页 |
| ·心 in Chinese and its sense structure | 第47-53页 |
| ·Some findings in the case study | 第53-54页 |
| ·Reasons for the cognitive differences | 第54-56页 |
| 5. Conclusion | 第56-58页 |
| Bibliography | 第58-60页 |
| Tables and Figures | 第60-61页 |
| Appendix | 第61页 |
