Intralinguistic (Genre1) transferability and prototypicality of meaning of polysemous words: the case of BREAK.2

The problem of the transferability of the various meanings of a polysemous word from one language to another has been studied by many researchers (e.g., Cunningham and Graham, 2000; Kellerman,1978; 1986; Viberg, 1999). The underlying theory of 'core' and 'prototype' has been used in many of psychology and psycholinguistics, such as perception (e.g. Rosch, 1973), cognitive psychology (e.g., Miller, 1978), language development (e.g., Nelson, 1985), semantics (e.g., Jackendoff, 1984, and Pause, Botz, and Egg, 1995), historical linguistics (e.g. Michaelis, 1996 on the diachronic analysis of the adverbial STILL, and Uhlenbeck, 1996, on the distinction between homonymy and polysemy), and by Bell (1998) on the “cancellative discourse markers”). The concepts of 'core' and 'prototype' have been used in the field of second language acquisition as well: Shirai (1990), for example, studied the prototype and metaphorical extensions of the verb PUT. The concepts of core and prototype are not identical: the notion of 'core' is regarded as a context-free, abstract essence of one set (or group), while 'prototype' is seen as the most typical member of a given set defined by a concept of core. Since 'core' is a concept which is free of context, the concrete meaning of each member belonging to a set defined by the core is determined by the context in which the member appears. In other words, the embodiment of core is determined by contextual information. Limiting himself to cases involving polysemous words, Miller (1978) points out two necessary conditions for actualization of the core: "(a) it is possible to identify central or core senses of polysemous words, and (b) it is possible to formulate construable rules governing the ways a core sense can be extended or provide other senses (p.102)."