What You Think Ain't What You Get: Highly polysemous verbs in mind and language

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

Starting from the observation that the concept of prototypicality in linguistics covers many different meanings, this article examines two definitions of the prototype often equated with each other, namely the most frequent item in language and the most salient item in the mind. On the basis of empirical data (corpora for linguistic frequency and elicitation tests for cognitive salience), it seeks to identify the prototypes of the highly polysemous verbs give and take . The analysis reveals that linguistic frequency and cognitive salience do not necessarily coincide. It also shows that the prototypes presented in the cognitive literature may turn out to be invalid when confronted with empirical evidence. These results emphasise the need for a clearer definition of prototypicality in linguistics.