Polysemy in German and Chinese A contrastive Study from a cognitive and cultural Perspective

As an important phenomenon in language, polysemy has received much attention in semantic research. In this paper, the author studies the semantic structure of polysemy and the corresponding semantic extension, based on the interpretation of polysemy and metaphor, in cognitive semantics. Through the comparative analysis of the polysemous words face and eat in German and Chinese, the author finds that the formation of the semantic structure, like concept formation, is closely related to human thinking, which, to a large extent, reflects the culture of a nation.