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Abstract
Conceptual integration, also called blending, was proposed as a cognitive mechanism to account for creativity in thought and language. A particular proposal was made that conceptual integration can account for monocategorial lexical polysemy in instances such as safeA in sentences such as The child is safe and The beach is safe. In this paper the theory of conceptual integration is presented, and it is shown that it can also account for a variety of instances of intercategorial polysemy, for example in N–V alternations such as sail and ache, as well as an example of A–N–V alternation, namely wide. It is argued that conceptual integration is able to account for both the semantic and grammatical changes in intercategorial polysemy, which has long been an unresolved issue in both morphological and semantic theories.