A model of lexical representation developed within cognitive lexical semantics. Principled polysemy was developed by Vyvyan Evans and Andrea Tyler in response to perceived shortcomings with the full-specification model of polysemy. In particular, a central concern of principled polysemy is to provide a methodologically motivated and principled way of conducting lexical semantic analysis, thereby avoiding the polysemy fallacy. Principled polysemy seeks to develop clear decision principles that make semantic network analyses objective and verifiable. These decision principles aim to achieve two goals: (1) they should serve to determine what counts as a distinct sense and thus distinguish between senses stored in semantic memory and context-dependent meanings constructed 'on-line'; (2) they should establish the prototypical or central sense associated with a particular radial category. The principled polysemy model has been successfully applied to a range of lexical classes including prepositions, nouns and verbs, and several languages in addition to English including Russian and Greek.