Toward a New Reading of Polysemy in Light of the Conceptual Blending Theory

Abstract

Modern cognitive approaches offer new outlets in the treatment of polysemy and suggest, with their different theoretical perceptions, renewed insights that attempt to explain the propagation of the phenomenon in the language. Conceptual blending theory is one of these approaches. It is a theory that is correlated with the theory of Mental Spaces. It links our conceptual structure with the concept of mental spaces. The blending theory attempts to override the limitations of the conceptual metaphor to explain certain linguistic expressions and compositions by proposing precise mechanisms that build the conceptual integration networks. The purpose of this work is to establish the theoretical underpinnings of blending theory to address a type of polysemy which is the compound noun with the head "Mother", to look at the effect of blending in the neology of this type of polysemy on the one hand and to discern the role of integration networks in distinguishing between the types of polysemy on the second hand.

It is an attempt, in the analysis that we will reach, to (1) overcome the issue of the polysemy categorizing in the lexicon by revealing the cognitive background that will explain the kinetics of the meaning and its transformation, and (2) bypassing the quadrant classification of the integration networks proposed in this theory, which confirms the susceptibility of such modern approaches to development and modification.