Polysemic Senses of Weight in Chilean Spanish

This paper presents an analysis of the polysemic senses of lexical items related to the conceptual domain of WEIGHT. This study is set within the framework of cognitive lexical semantics, where lexical items are assumed to constitute natural categories of related senses, which are organized in polysemic networks by cognitive principles such as metaphor, which motivate relations among the different senses (Taylor, Cuyckens and Dirven 2003). In this work, we assume that the inferential principles, properties and elements of the concrete experience domain (source domain), are projected upon other more abstract domains (target domains). Such projection makes metaphorical senses possible (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Thus, in Spanish, apart from the senses in the physical dimension, the lexical items within the domain of WEIGHT have senses in other domains, for example, IMPORTANCE, UNPLEASANTNESS and RESPONSIBILITIES. Polysemic lexical items are analysed taking into account their systematic relations with other elements which co-occur in certain syntactic patterns.