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Abstract: This paper investigates the polysemy of the Persian word /širin/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. It starts with introducing the principles of cognitive sociolinguistics, then investigates the polysemy of the Persian adjective /širin/ within the framework introduced by Robinson (2010), (2012a), (2012b), and (2014), to show that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of the language. In fact, social variables like age and gender affect the way people perceive different senses of the polysemous word. The data is gathered using documentary and field method(library research, interviews, and questionnaires). The research method employed is mixed(quantitative and qualitative). The statistical population is all monolingual Persian speakers living in Tehran, and the sample includes 200 subjects, 100 male and 100 females, in four different age groups of under 18, between 18 and 30, between 30 and 60, and above 60 years old. The results show that different senses of the polysemous word do not have the same distribution among different speakers, both male and female, belonging to different age groups, and are not accidental but explainable in terms of gender and age of the speakers. The results also indicate that cognitive sociolinguistics is more adequate in giving more exact explanations concerning meaning variation in polysemous words and the effect of social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each sense.

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The present paper aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /šax/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The study begins with introducing the tenets of cognitive sociolinguistics, and then goes on to investigate the polysemy of the Persian adjective /šax/ within this framework. In cognitive sociolinguistics, it is believed that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of a language. Rather, social variables like age and gender of speakers affect the way they perceive different senses of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with cognitive sociolinguistic, studies on polysemy, specifically those of Robinson (2010, 2012a, 2012b, and 2014), employed advanced statistical methods of Logistic Regression and Cross Tab to study the polysemy of Persian adjective /šax/ among 200 Persian speakers, both male and female, of different ages, selected from the Narmak neighborhood, Tehran, Iran, within the time span of spring and summer 2018. The results show that the cognitive sociolinguistic approach works desirably in lexical polysemy studies. In addition, the use of advanced statistical methods revealed a number of important facts about different senses of /šax/ in terms of age and gender, which provide a better description of polysemy in Persian language.