2011•Journal of Northeastern UniversityRequires access
Polysemy from the Cognitive Perspective
Ma Ming
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Abstract
Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon in which a lexical item has more than one related meaning.It is the diachronic result of language development facilitated by human cognition.New meanings,centering on the basic meaning and arranged in a radiant or linear manner,form the prototypical category of a word's semantics.People tend to attach new meanings to a lexical item by way of categorization,metaphor and metonymy,which results in the striking motivational features of polysemy.