Putting PUT to Use: Prototype and Metaphorical Extension Yasuhiro Shirai University of California, Los Angeles This paper investigates the relationship between prototype meanings and frequency of use with a view to establishing a foundation for the problem of 'prototype acquisition.' Prototype theory has been widely used in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and first and second language acquisition. However, the question of how people acquire and then use prototypes has not been extensively investigated. In this paper, one polysemous basic verb, PUT, was selected, and an attempt was made to investigate whether prototypes of polysemous lexical items are determined by their frequency of use. To determine the prototype of the verb PUT, a free elicitation test was used, in which native speakers of English (N=42) were asked to write the most typical sentence using PUT. The results yielded the following as the prototypical argument structure of PUT: Subject Inhuman] PUT PTRANS Object [+solid] Locative [-^horizontal surface] [+small] I+alienable] To investigate the meanings of PUT actually used in native speaker discourse, tokens of PUT in the UCLA Oral Corpus (spoken data) and the Brown Corpus (written data), each of which contain approximately 120,000 words, were analyzed. A major finding was that the prototype of PUT does not correspond to frequency of use. Specifically, PTRANS (= physical transfer) is not as frequent as NON-PTRANS which is a metaphorical extension from the prototype. This result is surprising since 87.8% of the native speakers surveyed produced PTRANS sentences as the prototype of PUT. The implications of the findings for both prototype theory and the acquisition of polysemy will be discussed. Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 1 No. 1 1990 78-97