Abstract: The Chinese character “兵” is one of the basic words in Chinese military terms, with a high frequency of use and a strong power of word formation. A cognitive study of its semantic extension, in light of the metaphor and metonymy theories in cognitive semantics, reveals that its meaning extends and changes in a spokewise fashion interlaced by a concatenate pattern, in which metaphorical and metonymic mappings are interwoven, and that metaphor and metonymy are two cognitive approaches to its semantic extension. This individual case reflects the universal law of the semantic extension of military terms. 

Key words: Bing(兵), military term, cognitive semantics, metaphor, metonymy