THE STUDY OF POLYSEMY IN THE FRAME OF METONYMY Take Body-Part Terms as Examples

Polysemy is a common phenomenon in languages.According to traditional semantics there is no necessary link between different meanings of an item and the produce of these meanings is arbitrary.While in cognitive semantics,it is believed that metaphor and metonymy are two major types of word meaning extension with the latter more basic one.Based on the definition of metonymy this paper categorized it into three types,namely,parts refer to the whole,the whole refer to parts,some parts refer to other parts and accordingly,study the Polysemy phenomenon in body-part terms both in English and Chinese.In these two languages,many body-part terms extend their meanings by means of metonymy.The character of it is that under the same cognitive framework,the more salient aspect refers to the less salient one.