Download or read book Polysemy written by Brigitte Nerlich and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.