/A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Approach to Lexical Polysemy, A Case Study: Persian Adjective /topol

Document Type : علمی - پژ‍وهشی

Authors

• Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei ¹
• Fatemeh Yousefi Rad ²

¹ Guest Lecturer of English and Linguistics, Payam-e Noor and Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

² Assistant Professor of linguistics, Payam-e Noor University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jlkd.2020.48245.0

Abstract

The present paper aimed at investigating the polysemy of the Persian word Topol from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The study begins with introducing the tenets of cognitive sociolinguistics, and then goes on to investigate the polysemy of the Persian adjective topol within this framework. In cognitive sociolinguistics, it is believed that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of a language. Rather, social variables like age and gender of speakers affect the way they perceive different senses of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with cognitive sociolinguistic studies on polysemy employed advanced statistical methods of Logistic Regression and Cross Tab to study the polysemy of Persian adjective Topol. The data were gathered through library research (including Persian dictionaries), interviews, and questionnaires. The research method employed is mixed, that is, qualitative and quantitative. The data were gathered from 200 participants, 100 male and 100 females, in four different age groups. The main hypothesis was that the “mere” cognitive approach is not adequate enough to explain lexical polysemy. The results indicate that cognitive sociolinguistics is indeed more adequate in giving more exact explanations concerning meaning variation in polysemous words and the effect of social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each sense. In other words, the results show that different senses of the polysemous words do not suggest the same distribution among different speakers, both male and female, belonging to different age groups, and is not accidental but explainable in terms of age and gender of the speakers.

Keywords

• Cognitive Sociolinguistics
• Polysemy
• Age
• Gender
• Social Variables

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