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The Principled Polysemy approach

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C10-P342

2026-01-14

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The Principled Polysemy approach

The Principled Polysemy approach proposed by Vyvyan Evans and Andrea Tyler (e.g. Evans 2004a; Tyler and Evans 2003) takes up Sandra’s challenge to develop clear decision principles that make semantic network analyses objective and verifiable. These decision principles should achieve two goals: (1) they should serve to determine what counts as a distinct sense and thus distinguish between senses stored in semantic memory (polysemy) and context-dependent meanings constructed ‘on-line’ (vagueness); (2) they should establish the prototypical or central sense associated with a particular radial category. The second point is important because cognitive semanticists have not always agreed about the central senses of categories. For example, while Lakoff argued that the central sense for over is the ABOVE-ACROSS meaning, Kreitzer (1997) has argued more recently that it is an ABOVE meaning. In their (2003) book The Semantics of English Prepositions, Tyler and Evans sought to provide decision principles that could be applied to the entire class of English prepositions. In the remainder of this section, we look in detail at how this approach works.