| dc.description.abstract | This thesis investigates polysemous common nouns in Gikuyu within the cognitive
framework and more specifically in cognitive semantics. Since polysemy has multiple but
related senses, finding any coherent system would seem to be very difficult. But its senses
are not random. When someone looks at inferences among them, it becomes clear that
there must be a systematic structure of some kind. Therefore this study will investigate
how context knowledge provided for through lexical frames can explain the polysemy of
words. In this investigation, The Fillmore's frame theory was used in analyzing the
polysemous Gikuyu nouns. One of the outstanding conclusions of the present study on the
polysemous Gikuyu nouns was that nouns form polysemy systematically and some senses
of a word are related to one another more or less closely by various means. The relatedness
in meaning of Gikuyu polysemous nouns can be divided into prototypical sense, radial
sense and the peripheral sense. Besides the radial senses which are more concrete, physical
and lying towards the prototype (centre of the category) the more abstract metaphorical
senses lie towards the periphery. Radial categories share more features with the prototype
than the peripheral categories. The other finding of the study was that the prototype is very
important in understanding the nature of human categorization and context is very
important in understanding the polysemy of nouns. Some of the sources of polysemy are
metonymy, metaphor, hyponymy and meronymy. Sense demarcation is detained through
autonomy mechanism and it is a useful tool for providing autonomy to a sense. Once a
word attains autonomy it triggers frames which come with the encyclopedic entries (frame
components) which help in the assignment of meaning. | en_US |
