A Unified Account of Polysemy within LCCM Theory

Description

Draft version as of 6th November 2013. To appear in ‘Lingua’, Special issue on ‘New Topics in Polysemy’. — 25 p.Within the cognitive linguistics tradition, polysemy has often been viewed as a function of underlying entries in semantic memory: word forms have distinct, albeit related, lexical entries, which thereby give rise to polysemous word senses in language use (e.g., Evans 2004; Tyler and Evans 2001, 2003). In this paper, I seek to broaden out the study of polysemy within this tradition by tackling it from two slightly different angles. I argue that polysemy can also arise from the non-linguistic knowledge to which words facilitate access. This phenomenon I refer to as conceptual polysemy. I illustrate this with an analysis of the lexical item book. Moreover, polysemy also arises from different word forms which, at least on first blush, appear to share a common semantic representation. This phenomenon I refer to as inter-lexical polysemy. I illustrate with a detailed case study involving an analysis of the prepositional forms in and on. In presenting my account of these two polysemous phenomena, I introduce a contemporary account of lexical representation: the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models, or LCCM Theory for short (Evans 2006, 2009, 2013). This provides a common theoretical architecture which facilitates a joined-up account of these specific phenomena, and of polysemy more generally.