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The purpose of this study was to investigate the polysemy “分” in Taiwanese Southern Min from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. According to the MOE TSM Common Words Dictionary, 分has three different pronunciations: Literary readings HUN, colloquial readings PUN ,and HūN ,which doesn’t stand as an independent lexical item in the dictionary. The three display differences in function and meanings. PUN is often used as a verb, meaning ‘send, assign, give, beg, or adopt’ etc.; HUN is often used as a noun indicating the unit of measurement or is combined with numerals to describe degree or extent , it can also be used as a verb denoting ‘depart’, ‘separate’ or is ‘distribute’. It is proposed that, the prototypical meaning of PUN implies an image schema of dynamic events of segmentation and giving out. The giving element leads to the further shift to causative function as in pun guá khuànn ‘let me have a look’ and pun lâng tsia̍h ‘let somebody share the food’. For PUN to denote both ‘give’ and ‘beg’ in fact is a matter of differences in perspective, as word tsioh in Mandarin Chinese, which can mean both ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’ depending on the preposition it collocates . The word HUN’s prototypical meaning is ‘divide’, the difference between HūN and HUN lies in the tones. In Chinese, the derivation between nouns and verbs can be marked by tones, and therefore we considered it was the result of metonymy, using Action to name the Result. Along with sound change and semantic evolution, come the co-existence of the literary reading and colloquial reading, and the differences in the contexts different pronunciations of 分 is used.
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