Analysis of Adjectives “Takai” as A Polysemy: A Cognitive Linguistic Study

Abstract

When compared to Indonesian, Japanese has a peculiarity or uniqueness in its vocabulary. Therefore, Japanese has its own difficulties when we try to understand it. One of the difficulties is when we try to understand vocabulary that has many meanings or is often called polysemy (tagigo). From the many words of the adjective, the writer found one of the adjectives that is polysemy, that is the adjective “takai”. This research aims to describe the basic meaning, the extended meaning, the relationship between the basic meaning and the expansion meaning of adjectives “takai” as a polysemy. The research method that used to solve the problem in this research is descriptive research method. From the results of the analysis, concluded 1) The adjective takai has seven meanings, namely: tall or high, great/big, sharp/taper, top, expensive, good and loud 2) The basic meaning of the adjective takai is tall 3) If studied using cognitive linguistic studies, the relations between the basic meaning and the expansion of the adjective takai leads to metonymy expansion figure of speech to all the meaning of its expansion, namely: great/big, sharp/taper, top, expensive, good and loud.