A Comparative Study of “Head” on Polysemy Between Chinese and English Based on Image Projection

Image projection, motivated by our embodied structure of experience from the interaction with the outside world, is a cognitive process of transferring the structure of image schema from a source domain into the target one to express an abstract category and concept. The process of image projection provides cognitive motivation for the semantic network of a polyseme. This paper, with English and Chinese WordNet as references, is a comparative study on meaning extension of the polyseme "head" both in Chinese and English from the perspective of image projection in cognitive linguisitcs. The findings are as follows:there are similarities and differences of image projection in the formation of polysemy both in English and Chinese. Specifically, Chinese is of more image of "head" while English is of more metaphorical moving image of "head".