Polysemy of Welsh Llawn 'Full' in the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym

Abstract

In our pilot research on polysemy and semantic changes of the Welsh adjective llawn we analyse its use in the language of Dafydd ap Gwilym (ca. 1320–1370), which can easily be done now with the help of the electronic resource www.dafyddapgwilym.net. We put this data in the context of a project on lexical typology, carried out by the Moscow Lexical Typology Group, which aims at describing polysemy patterns in basic adjectives of Russian, Serbian, German, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other languages of the world. Both the direct and metaphorical meanings of the Welsh llawn are close to what is found in other languages analysed; however, there are certain peculiarities to be addressed.