'Awesome' insights into semantic variation
Justyna Robinson · Sussex Research Online (University of Sussex) · 2010
This paper demonstrates benefits of employing the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach in the investigation of lexical polysemy.The discussion is based on the usage-based analysis of the adjective awesome in a speech community.The results indicate that polysemy is far from being a stable phenomenon both at the conceptual level as well as at the sociolinguistic level.This work also suggests that combining cognitive and sociolinguistic analytical methods provides helpful insights into flexibility of a polysemous category.