Investigating the Polysemy of the Prefix /hæm-/ in Persian Based on Cognitive Semantic Approach

One of the issues discussed in the framework of cognitive semantics is the issue of polysemy. One of the fundamental concepts in polysemy is radial categories. In cognitive semantics, a polysemous word forms a category, and the different meanings of that word are assigned to the members of that category. From this point of view, prefixes also have multiple meanings that can be added to their bases. In this regard, in the present study, the polysemy of the prefix /hæm-/ was investigated by relying on the cognitive semantics approach. The methodological nature of this qualitative study was descriptive-analytic, and the data have been collected by library research method including Dehkhoda Dictionary (1995), Mo’in Dictionary (2003) and Amid Dictionary (2011). The findings indicated that the non-verbal prefix /hæm-/ is a polysemous prefix with a range of lexical functions. It’s worth mentioning that this prefix in some cases changes the lexical meaning of the verbal root, and thus creates a distinct lexical element. And also, the results showed that the prefix /hæm-/ consists of five distinctive meaning. Based on factors to determine the prototypemeaning, it was found that among the existing meanings, the meaning of "sharing" is the core or prototypemeaning of the prefix /hæm-/, and four other semantic clusters are formed around this core meaning. Accordingly, the prefix /hæm-/ has formed a category that gathers all its meanings around a core meaning, just like lexical categories.