The extension of word meaning is the expression of the cognitive thinking of human beings. Constructed based on the similarity and contiguity between things and concepts, metaphor and metonymy, as the basic cognitive thinking, are important ways of realizing meaning extension. The traditional teaching of polysemantic words often subdivides their different items of meaning, neglecting the cognitive interrelation among them, which hardly takes effects in language teaching. This paper aims to analyze the internal mechanism of meaning extension from a cognitive perspective and discusses how to develop the cognitive thinking of polysemantic words in English vocabulary teaching.%词义扩展是人类认知思维的体现。隐喻和转喻是人类基本的认知思维，分别基于事物和概念间的相似性和邻近性而构建，是实现词义扩展的重要手段。传统的多义词教学往往将其各个义项独立，忽略彼此之间的认知关联，教学效果差强人意。从认知角度来分析词义扩展的内在机制，并对英语词汇教学中如何培养多义词的认知思维进行研究。
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