In an article titled, “Where does prototypicality come from?” Dirk Geeraerts(2007:176–77) provides a number of factors that beget this phenomenon; and when it comes to identifying the prototypical usage of a word he discusses how introspection can prove useful.
prototypes
“For illustrative purposes, let us sketch a plausible (though simplistic) scenario for the evolution of a complex category. […]
Already by the first century CE, ἐκ & ἀπό have experience over a thousand years of history and […]
I got my hands on this little guy last week: Dirk Geeraerts’ Diachronic Prototype Semantics: A Contribution to […]