This article examines verbal polysemy in Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) from a cognitive and cross-linguistic perspective, using the verb cortar (‘to cut’) as a case study. The study starts with the assumption that communicative approaches tend to present lexical meanings in a contextualized but fragmented way, which hinders learners’ ability to perceive the internal coherence of polysemous words and limits their productive extension. Drawing on lexicographic data, corpus-based collocations, curricular resources and translation examples, the study explores how meanings are structured and lexicalized across Spanish, Dutch and English. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between dominant and non-dominant translations as a tool to account for cross-linguistic variation. The results show that traditional categories such as the literal–figurative distinction are insufficient to describe the polysemous network. Overall, the study argues that polysemy represents a pedagogical opportunity for a more coherent, explicit and L1-sensitive approach to vocabulary teaching.