Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Seyed Mahmoud Motesharrei ¹
• Fatemeh Yousefi Rad ²

¹ Ph.D. in Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University

² Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Payam-e Noor University

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /jigar/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The main objective is to show that cognitive sociolinguistic approach is more adequate to explain lexical polysemy in comparison to cognitive linguistics. 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 meanings of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with Robinson (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014), investigates the effects of two social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each meaning of the polysemous word /jigar/. The data are gathered through library research (e.g., using Persian dictionaries), interviews, and questionnaires. The research method employed is hybrid, i.e. qualitative and quantitative. The data are gathered from 200 subjects, 100 male and 100 females, in four different age groups in Tehran. The results indicated 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 are not accidental but explainable in terms of age and gender of the speakers.

Keywords

• Cognitive sociolinguistics
• Polysemy
• Age
• Gender
• Social variables