La polisemia léxica como oportunidad pedagógica: un enfoque cognitivo del currículum de vocabulario en ELE

Abstract

This article examines the teaching of verbal polysemy from a cognitive perspective, focusing on the verb cortar in the Spanish as a Foreign Language curriculum. It starts from the observation that, in communicative approaches, meanings are presented in highly contextualized ways, which limits learners’ access to the polysemous potential of a lexical item, as evidenced by data from the Instituto Cervantes Curriculum Plan and learner corpora (CEDEL2, CAES). Through a contrastive analysis of Spanish, Dutch, and English, the study explores the internal organization of meanings, identifying how each language profiles different aspects of the event. The analysis shows that, although metaphor has traditionally received more attention, it is changes in profile–base relations that primarily give rise to lexical inequivalences and, as a result, hinder learners’ ability to produce new meanings of a known lexical item. The findings suggest that polysemy constitutes a pedagogical opportunity for introducing curricular improvements.