2. A topic that we will not be able to pursue in detail is the demarcation between
different types of meaning. Different types of meaning relatedness of the same form have,
in fact, been identified and labeled. One such case of lexical ambiguity is ‘‘classical poly-
semy’’ or ‘‘polycentric categorization’’ (see Taylor 1989, 2003), in which, for example,
the English word chest can mean the ‘upper front part of the human body’, ‘a case or a box
with a lid’, or a ‘treasury of a public institution’. In such cases, as noted by Dunbar (2001:
2), ‘‘the extensions do not overlap, but there is a conceptual relationship.’’ Classical po-
lysemy, understood in this way, should be distinguished from what is usually known as
‘‘vagueness,’’ where a word is unmarked for a certain category, as in the English word
doctor, which is vague with reference to gender. The distinction between vagueness and
polysemy is blurred as the same lexical forms can also profile parts of different domains in
their respective semantic base. For instance, the adjective fast in a fast car as opposed to
fast in a fast drink or the noun window understood either as a glass pane or a wooden frame
evoke different domains and profile different attributes of the things they refer to. Such
examples as fast or window involve profiling of parts associated with an object within one
conceptual domain and are called ‘‘natural’’ (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2002), ‘‘system-
atic,’’ or ‘‘complementary polysemy’’ (see Pustejovsky 1991; Pustejovsky and Boguraev 1999;
Pustejovsky and Bouillon 1999). Another class representing related senses involves con-
ceptual categories such as bird, which embraces all varieties of birds, from prototypical
category members such as sparrows or robins, through eagles and owls, to peripheral
category exemplars such as penguins or ostriches.
3. Nerlich, Todd, and Clarke (1998) report cases of young children who tell one
another jokes such as these: Why does the teacher wear sunglasses? Because her class is so
bright; or, What’s the hardest thing when learning to ride a bike? The road.
4. For instance, in his important book on diachronic prototype semantics, Geeraerts
(1997) proposes two major causes of semantic change, ‘‘expressivity’’ and ‘‘efficiency.’’
Efficiency is shaped by two counteracting principles: the principle of isomorphism
(avoidance of polysemy and homonymy) and the principle of prototypicality, which, as
Geeraerts showed in a number of case studies, secures the structural stability of concepts
with the simultaneous maintenance of informational density and their flexible adaptability.
5. The following topics are examples of those researched in Cognitive Linguistics:

even though motivated in Lakoff’s (1987) sense, are unpredictable by general rules alone.
They should instead be accounted for by more specific cognitive principles interacting with
a variety of other functions and principles.
10. See also Tyler and Evans (2003: 95) for the concept of a ‘‘protoscene’’: an abstract,
primary meaning component. Tyler and Evans argue for a basically monosemic analysis of
polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics and propose a dividing line between ‘‘what counts as a
distinct sense conventionalized in semantic memory, and a contextual inference produced
on-line for the purpose of local understanding’’ (106).
11. Cecil Brown (1983), an anthropologist, quotes examples of languages where ‘eye’
(the more salient element) was extended to cover ‘face’, but not vice versa. This process is
frequently accompanied by assigning overt marking to this extended form and the poly-
semy is then dropped.
12. However, Zlatev (2003) rejects a distinction between polysemy and monosemic
generality: he dispenses with the polysemy analysis in the case of spatial prepositions in
Indo-European languages and argues against positing a constant ‘‘basic meaning.’’ Criti-
cism of a polysemy position which—in some cases—does allow for an analysis in terms of
‘‘the same psychologically primitive concept,’’ comes from such researchers as Rakova
(2003), who argues for a ‘‘no polysemy’’ view of conceptual structure.
13. See Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2004: 408): The consequence of Bierwisch’s two-
level model to the analysis of polysemic items is ‘‘a postulate of the existence of the identical
semantic, i.e. monosemous, level with alternative conceptual interpretations, limiting thus,
in fact, the range of polysemy in language. Bierwisch’s model is consonant with the
modularity thesis concerning the division of work between linguistic and other cognitive
faculties of the mind. The semantic representations Bierwisch postulates have a predicate-
argument structure and are based on semantic primitives that underlie them. Even though
Langacker’s and Bierwisch’s models are cognitive models, they refer in fact to different
realities. In both models polysemic items involve relatedness of senses. While, however in
Langacker’s network model, the subsuming schema, to use Tuggy’s term (1993), if of a
similar cognitive character as its instantiations, in the two-level model, the two are qual-
itatively different—the ‘superschema’ represents a unitary linguistic meaning, while the

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