smoke 2 →smoke 3 (V =‘cause to V’):
open, break, roll, freeze
smoke 3 →smoke 4 (V =‘V something’):
eat, drink, read, write
smoke 1 →smoke 5 (V =‘put N into/onto something’):
paint, butter, water, powder, steam
Notice that each relationship affects a different group of verbs. Each pairwise relationship is semi-productive, but the
entire branching structure of senses forsmokeis unique. This means that no general process of extension from a
prototype can predict all the linkages: they are different for every word.
A linking relationship among senses is more suspicious when it is impossible tofindanyother lexical items that
participate in the same relationship. An example is the two senses ofinto:
(9) a. into 1 X=‘path terminating in the interior of X’
(run into the room)
b. into 2 X=‘path terminating in violent contact with X’
(run into the wall)I a mhappy totreat these senses as relatedonly inthat theybothexpress ter mination(the‘to’portion). Themorpheme
inininto 1 is the usual sense ofin;but I a minclined to see the morphe meinininto 2 as like thegooseingooseberry, having
nothingtodo withnormalin. Deane(1996), bycontrast,asks for more:hewishes toanalyzeinto 2 as‘pathwhichwould
have carried an object to the inside of X if the boundary had not impeded it.’There is something not quite correct
about this analysis, since you can crash into a mirror, even though you could neverfit inside it. But more troubling is
that there are no other prepositions that have this counterfactual sense. For instance, you cannot crashundera table by
landing violentlyon topof it—thoughyou wouldhaveended up under thetableif its boundary had notimpeded your
motion. Consequently, there is nothing to gain by extracting out this relation between the twointosas a subregularity.
Moreover, there is no general process of extension of a prototype that will get tointo 2 frominto 1 , or that will get both
from a more abstract sense they have in common.
Any theory of the lexicon will have to make these distinctions in types of polysemy. In Cognitive Grammar, a theory
that takes issues of polysemy seriously, there is sometimes a tendency to assume that much of this machinery will be
rendered unnecessary by assuming a general process of extension from a prototype. I have tried to show that in the
present cases such a strategy won't work.
This is not to say that there are n o general processes of concept extension in