Chung, Yung-sik. 1997. Polysemous Meaning of English Verbs. Studies in Modern Grammatical Theories 10: 115-147. To explain the systematic relationships among the interrelated meanings, this study adopts the lexical network approach proposed by Langacker(1991). The relationships among a large number of related senses of a polysemous lexical item can be characterized in terms of relationships between a schema and its instances on the other, and all these relationships cannot be explained without taking human cognitive abilities into account. With reference to the cognitive processing, the following processes, among others, are found to be at work: First, the systematic relationships among the various meanings of a lexical item are obtained by applying the profile shift to the same conceptual base. The relationships between transitive verbs and corresponding intransitive verbs are remarkable examples of the profile shift. Second, semantic extension from the concrete meaning to the abstract meaning results from the domain shift. Therefore, a word can refer to many objects or events, and the semantic category of a word consists of entities referred to by the word. The purpose of this study is to show that these cognitive principles operate on language by investigating the process of semantic extension of verbs, and to show the systematic relationships among the interrelated meanings of a lexical item based on the semantic analysis of affect verbs such as the English `break` etc.