一词多义是一种普遍的语言现象,但绝非普通的语言现象。如何对这一现象做出全面合理的解释,绝非易事,这一现象的阐释涉及人的心智与认知。本文以认知语言学中的隐喻及转喻理论为基础,以汉语中的“老”与英语中的“old”义项为例,分析这一现象产生的原因以及各义项之间的关系。通过对“老”与“old”的词义进行对比分析,本文发现这两词并不是完全的一一对应关系,这是由于文化与认知思维的差异所造成的。为此,本文认为一词多义现象不仅仅是一种语言现象,更是人类认知从具体到抽象延伸之产物。 Polysemy is a common linguistic phenomenon, but not an ordinary linguistic phenomenon. It is no easy task to give a comprehensive and reasonable explanation of this phenomenon. The interpretation of this phenomenon involves people’s mind and cognition. Based on the theory of metaphor and metonymy in cognitive linguistics, this paper takes the “old” in Chinese and the “old” in English as an example to analyze the causes of this phenomenon and the relations between various meanings Relationship. By comparing the meaning of “old” with “old”, this paper finds that these two words are not completely one-to-one correspondence, which is caused by the difference of culture and cognitive thinking. For this reason, this article argues that the word polysemy is not just a linguistic phenomenon, but also a product of the extension of human cognition from concrete to abstract.