Publications
Publication details [#19381]
Cuyckens, Hubert and Britta E. Zawada, eds. 2001. Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected papers from the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, 1997. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 177). John Benjamins. xxviii + 296 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Keywords
ISBN
90 272 3683 6
Annotation
In cognitive linguistics, polysemy is regarded as a categorizing phenomenon; i.e., related meanings of words form categories centering around a prototype and bearing family resemblance relations to one another. Under this view, the scope of investigation has been gradually broadened from categories in the lexical and lexico-grammatical domain to morphological, syntactic, and phonological categories. The papers in this volume illustrate the importance of polysemy in describing these various categories. A first set of papers analyzes the polysemy of such lexical categories as prepositions and scalar particles, and looks at the import of polysemy in frame-based dictionary definitions. A second set shows that noun classes, case, and locative prefixes constitute meaningful and polysemous categories. Three papers, then, pay attention to polysemy from a psychological perspective, looking for psychological evidence of polysemy in lexical categories.
Articles in this volume
Smith, Michael B. Why Quirky Case Really Isn’t Quirky. Or how to treat dative sickness in Icelandic. 115
Selvik, Kari-Anne. When a Dance Resembles a Tree. A polysemy analysis of three Setswana noun classes. 161