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Semantic Maps and Mental Representation

Semantic maps are usually assumed to describe a universal arrangement of different conceptual situations in a speaker's mind as determined by perceived relations of similarity between these conceptual situations. This paper provides a number of arguments that challenge this view, based on various types of evidence from processes of semantic change and synchronic implicational universals. The multifunctionality patterns described by semantic maps may originate from processes of form-function recombination in particular contexts rather than any perceived similarity between individual conceptual components. These patterns may also originate from the fact that a particular functional principle leads to the association of a particular construction type with different conceptual situations, independently of any specific relation between these conceptual situations as such. A number of synchronic and diachronic phenomena pertaining to the very structure of individual semantic maps further reveal that, even if one assumes that these provide a representation of similarity relations between different conceptual situations, they do so only to a limited extent.