This book provides a representative survey of early and more recent concerns in cognitively inspired lexical semantics. As such, it focuses on the issue of polysemy vs. monosemy, it offers fresh perspectives on prototypicality in lexical categories, it sheds light on the development of lexical items in child language acquisition and in diachrony, and it looks at issues going beyond the individual lexical item (onomasiology, synonymy, the relationship between lexical and syntactic meaning).

Hubert Cuyckens is Professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium. René Dirven is Professor Emeritus at the University of Duisburg, Germany. John Taylor teaches at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Introduction: New directions in cognitive lexical semantic research
John Taylor, Hubert Cuyckens and René Dirven

Meaning potentials and context: Some consequences for the analysis of variation in meaning
Jens Allwood

Towards a pragmatic model of cognitive onomasiology
Stefan Grondelars and Dirk Geeraerts

Monosemy versus polysemy
Theo A.J.M. Janssen

The grammaticalization of alltså and således: Two Swedish conjuncts revisited
Hanna Lehti-Eklund

Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning
Laura A. Michaelis

Metonymic sense shift: Its origins in hearers' abductive construal of usage in context
Kurt Queller

Growth of a lexical network: Nine English prepositions in acquisition
Sally Rice

Image schemas and category coherence: The case of the Portuguese verb deixar
Augusto Soares da Silva

The Nawatl verb kîsa: A case study in polysemy
David Tuggy

A diachronic perspective on prototypicality: The case of Nominal Adjectives in Japanese
Satoshi Uehara

Containment, support, and linguistic relativity
Claude Vandeloise

The Dutch hedges echt and gewoon: Markers of prototypicality?
Christof Vanden Eynde

Polysemy or generality? Mu.
Jordan Zlatev