The Polysemy of China's Classical Poetry

The in-depth study of poetry polysemy began with the establishment of semantics after the 20th century. Semantics is one of the three branches of semiotics, which mainly studies the relationship between language symbols and the objects they refer to. Some people study poetry with semiotic theory, and regard poetry as a symbol, which is called "compound symbol". The meaning projected by this "complex symbol" is only a part of the meaning it contains. This involves the fuzziness of poetry. It is undoubtedly a way to study the art of poetry from the perspective of semantics. However, semantic analysis can never replace the discussion of the artistic law of poetry. In the book Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson of Britain studies ambiguity and ambiguity in poetry from the perspective of semantics, which is valuable, but it does not mean that the study of poetry art is rich and implicit.

There are similarities between the polysemy of poetry and the polysemy of words in lexicology. Poetry can achieve polysemy by means of polysemy, but it is not the same thing.

According to the explanation of lexicology, because there are so many words in a language that it is impossible to express complex objective things and phenomena one by one, it is inevitable that there will be polysemy. However, no matter how many meanings a word has, these meanings are certain and recognized by the society. The polysemy of poetry is different from the polysemy of words in lexicology. Poets should not only express their feelings with the meaning of words, but also artistically drive words to form images and artistic conception, arouse all kinds of imagination and association in readers' hearts and arouse all kinds of emotional waves. When writing poetry, poets often use artistic techniques to emphasize or change the meaning of words locally and give them poetic interest, so that a word with recognized and definite meaning has complex meaning and the poet's subjective color. When reading a poem, readers' imagination, association and emotion, as well as the images presented in their minds, are inseparable from the scope stipulated by the meaning, but they vary from person to person and from time to time. Readers with different life experience, ideological realm, psychological temperament and literary accomplishment can have different understandings of the meaning of the same poem or the same word in a poem. The same reader will have different experiences when reading the same poem at different times. It can be seen that the ambiguity of poetry has certain subjectivity and uncertainty.

In addition, polysemy in lexicology is to summarize the different meanings of the same word in different language environments and point out its original meaning and extended meaning. If viewed in isolation, a polysemous word certainly has many meanings, but in practice, generally speaking, only one meaning is used at a time. Ambiguity is a common problem to be avoided when using language.

In poetry, it is precisely to avoid the simplification of the meaning of words, and always make words have multiple meanings as much as possible, thus causing extensive associations and achieving polysemy. The intriguing feature of China's classical poetry lies in this compound function. If the sentence "poetry is meaningless" is understood as an unexplained poem, it is certainly wrong, and if it is understood from the ambiguity of poetry, it is also reasonable. China's classical poems are polysemy. When reading poetry, different people have different views, so it is natural for people to have different experiences and understandings.