An approach to cognitive lexical semantics associated with the work of George Lakoff.

In his work on the English preposition over Lakoff argued for a highly detailed inventory of senses as being stored by the language user in semantic memory.

This full-specification approach towards polysemy has subsequently been criticized, for, among other things, being methodologically unconstrained and for failing to distinguish between lexical concepts that must be stored in the mind of a language user and meanings associated with a word due to context and pragmatic inferencing.