Three-factor prototypicality evaluation and the verb look

•A three-factor measurement of semantic prototypicality.•Measures involve: frequency, contextual saliency and inter-category similarity.•Exemplified by a highly polysemous lexeme – the verb look.

Various linguistic and extra-linguistic criteria have been put forward as useful for evaluating the semantic prototypicality of polysemous lexemes. It has been suggested that most of these criteria are linked to frequency of occurrence of senses. However, the provision of additional quantitative linguistic data can shed more light on this complex lexical issue. The present paper embarks on a corpus-based investigation of whether a three-factor measurement of prototypicality based on a) frequency of occurrence of a sense (as the central feature), b) contextual saliency, and c) inter-category similarity produces significant results, particularly when applied to a highly polysemous lexeme – in this case the verb look. Besides investigating the quantitative linguistic background of the central (prototypical) member of a semantic category, the paper briefly scrutinizes whether the same combination of quantitative data can be applied to gauging the level of prototypicality of senses other than the prototype. The findings strongly support the application of the proposed three-factor methodology and point to the need for further work on the identification of suitable criteria for evaluating attested levels of category membership of multiple senses of a lexeme.