Derivation and semantic autonomy

The article focuses on the polysemy and usage patterns of the Polish lexeme głowa “head” and its diminutive główka. Based on corpus methodology and cognitive linguistics analysis, it is argued that the two lexemes are too autonomous in their meanings than predicted by their morphological relatedness. As the two words cover different semantic domains, we observe that the diminutive suffix has developed a new function which signals lexicalization of meaning toward a non-human semantic domain, for example, material objects, plants, etc. Our research contributes to studies on Polish morphology and lexical semantics and to theoretical research on the polysemy of body part terms.