The construal of polysemous adjectives: Corpus-based evidence from sentence schemas and constructions

Beschreibung

Semantically complex linguistic structures have regularly presented a challenge to traditional accounts of semantics as well as cognitive lexical semantics. In Cognitive Linguistics, the discussion of polysemy has largely been influenced by the controversy revolving around the so-called 'polysemy fallacy', i.e. ―the tendency to look for polysemy even when there is no evidence for it" (Sandra 1998: 361). The problems multiply when the category concerned is an adjective, which has been referred to as an 'old' problem (e.g. Taylor 1992, Aitchison 1994). The difficulties encountered primarily reside in the category ADJECTIVE itself. Since all adjectives are predisposed for certain properties both in the content domain and the schematic domain(Paradis 2001: 50), their construal occurs by virtue of the rich semantic structure in the content domain as well as the conceptual representations in the schematic domain. In the light of these difficulties, polysemous adjectives have remained underresearched within the cognitive-linguistic framework. Adopting a fresh perspective, this paper proposes a cognitive account of adjectival polysemy on the basis of the adjective new. The following three points provide the cornerstones for the analysis: Firstly, it devises a model of the conceptual structure of the category NEW, demonstrating that its multiple meanings are derived from the prototype by means of metaphorical extensions. Secondly, drawing on Evans's 'principled polysemy approach' on the one hand, and Talmy's proposal of a lexicon-grammar continuum that structures the cognitive representation of a given concept on the other, the meaning potential of the adjective will be examined in detail. Thirdly, the evidence will be derived from a corpus-based analysis of the adjective's construal, focusing on the constraining influences, in discourse processing, of sentence schemas such as motion and transfer schemas, and constructions, for example the ditransitive construction.

Zeitraum	6 Juli 2010 → 8 Juli 2010
Ereignistitel	The 3rd UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, University of Hertfordshire
Veranstaltungstyp	Keine Angaben
Bekanntheitsgrad	International