Polysemy

by Nerlich, Brigitte

• ISBN13: 9783110176162
• ISBN10: 3110176165
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Mouton De Gruyter

Summary

About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Polysemy and flexibility: introduction and overview	p. 3
Cognitive models of polysemy	p. 31
Polysemy: past and present	p. 49
Polysemy and conceptual blending	p. 79
Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: the case of over	p. 95
Polysemy as flexible meaning: experiments with English get and Finnish pitaa	p. 161
Metonymic polysemy and its place in meaning extension	p. 195
Polysemy in derivational affixes	p. 217
The role of links and/or qualia in modifier-head constructions	p. 233
Polysemy and bleaching	p. 253
Polysemy in the lexicon and in discourse	p. 267
Irony in conversation: salience, role, and context effects	p. 297
Young children's and adults' use of figurative language: how important are cultural and linguistic influences?	p. 317
Emerging patterns and evolving polysemies: the acquisition of get between four and ten years	p. 333
"I don't believe in word senses"	p. 361
Senses and texts	p. 393
Index	p. 411
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