PreliminariesPolysemy is usually characterized as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses, as in (1) below:(1) draw a line; read a line; a line around eyes; a wash on a line; wait in a line; a line of bad decisions, etc.In this, it is contrasted with monosemy, on the one hand, and with homonymy, on the other. While a monosemous form has only one meaning, a homonymous form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings (e.g., coach; 'bus', 'sports instructor'), and is standardly viewed as involving different lexemes (e.g., COACH1, COACH2).Polysemy is pervasive in natural languages, and affects both content and function words. While deciding which sense is intended on a given occasion of use rarely seems to cause any difficulty for speakers of a language, polysemy has proved notoriously difficult to treat both theoretically and empirically. Some of the questions that have occupied linguists, philosophers and psychologists interested in the phenomenon concern the representation of polysemous senses in the mental lexicon, how we should deal with polysemous words in a compositional theory of meaning, how novel senses of a word arise in the course of communication, and how hearers, usually effortlessly, arrive at the contextually appropriate sense on a given occasion of use.The definition and delimitation of the polysemy phenomenon itself also remains a source of theoretical discussion across disciplines: how do we tell polysemy apart from monosemy on the one hand, and from homonymy on the other? At first glance, the contrast with monosemy is clearer: while a monosemous term has only a single meaning, a polysemous term is associated with several senses.However, the literature shows that distinguishing polysemy from monosemy is far from a trivial matter. A famous case in point is the debate between Jackendoff 2 (1992a) and Fodor (1998) Another type of test exploits the impossibility of anaphorically referring to different senses (Cruse, 2004a). For instance, in the sentence ?John read a line from his new poem. It was straight. the pronoun cannot simultaneously refer to a sense of line combinable with the modifier straight (e.g., 'long, narrow mark or band') and the sense of line in the previous sentence ('row of written/printed words'), which suggests that we have to do with a case of lexical ambiguity.However, such tests for identity of meaning do not give clear-cut answers (for a review, see Geeraerts, 1993). In particular, only a slight manipulation of the context can yield a different result, as shown by the following example (Norrick, 1981: 115):(2) a. ? Judy's dissertation is thought provoking though yellowed with age.b. Judy's dissertation is still thought provoking though yellowed with age.While the sentence in (2a) is zeugmatic -apparently due to the use of Judy's dissertation to refer to a type of informational content in the first conjunct and a physical object in the second conjunct -no zeugmatic effect occurs when the sentence is slightly altered ...

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animates metonymically on the basis of a salient property. Although children were outperformed by adults, even three-year-olds could understand and produce metonyms in certain circumstances. Our results suggest that young children may find it easier to produce a metonym than a more elaborate referential description in certain contexts, and that metonymy may serve as a useful strategy in referring to entities that lack a conventional label. However, metonymy comprehension appeared to decrease with age, with older children tending to choose literal interpretations of some metonyms. This could be a result of growing metalinguistic awareness, which leads children to overemphasize literal meanings.

A large number of word forms in natural language are polysemous, that is, associated with several related senses (e.g., line, run, tight, etc.). While such polysemy appears to cause little difficulty in verbal communication, it poses a range of theoretical and descriptive problems. One concerns its very existence: What is it about our language systems that make them so susceptible to polysemy? In this paper I discuss two approaches to polysemy with different answers to this question: (i) A code-based approach that treats polysemy in terms of the operation of lexicon-internal generative rules, and (ii) an inference-based approach that takes polysemy to be governed by pragmatic inferential processes applying at the level of individual words. After evaluating how each of these accounts fares with respect to some empirical data, I look more broadly at their implications for the emergence and development of polysemy. I conclude that, overall, the pragmatic approach provides the most promising basis for a unified account of the role of polysemy in several domains, and for explaining what motivates its proliferation natural language.

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Polysemy is characterized as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses. It is distinguished from monosemy, where one word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings. Although the distinctions between polysemy, monosemy, and homonymy may seem clear at an intuitive level, they have proven difficult to draw in practice. Polysemy proliferates in natural language: Virtually every word is polysemous to some extent. Still, the phenomenon has been largely ignored in the mainstream linguistics literature and in related disciplines such as philosophy of language. However, polysemy is a topic of relevance to linguistic and philosophical debates regarding lexical meaning representation, compositional semantics, and the semantics–pragmatics divide. Early accounts treated polysemy in terms of sense enumeration: each sense of a polysemous expression is represented individually in the lexicon, such that polysemy and homonymy were treated on a par. This approach has been strongly criticized on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Since at least the 1990s, most researchers converge on the hypothesis that the senses of at least many polysemous expressions derive from a single meaning representation, though the status of this representation is a matter of vivid debate: Are the lexical representations of polysemous expressions informationally poor and underspecified with respect to their different senses? Or do they have to be informationally rich in order to store and be able to generate all these polysemous senses? Alternatively, senses might be computed from a literal, primary meaning via semantic or pragmatic mechanisms such as coercion, modulation or ad hoc concept construction (including metaphorical and metonymic extension), mechanisms that apparently play a role also in explaining how polysemy arises and is implicated in lexical semantic change.