Le problème de la polysémie verbale : donner en français

The epistemologic position about polysemic studies is : how to abstract a semantic invariant with a cognitive relevance from different meanings of occurrences of a same linguistic unit ? The different meanings are expressed by semantico-cognitive schemes (SSC), organized inside a network; they are expressed inside an applicative formalism (Church’s l-calculus) where operators are applied to operands of different types. Primitives, closely related to cognitive domains of perception and action, are elementary constituents of the schemes. The method is illustrated by a semantic analysis of the French verb donner (‘to give’) and a brief comparison with the Korean verb juda.