Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning.

Polysemy and co-predication

“…On polysemy in general, seeFalkum & Vicente (2015);Vicente & Falkum (2017). The tripartite distinction is relevant to the issue of how rich/thin word meanings plausibly are: seeVicente (2017;2018). Here we will suggest that inherent polysemy requires rich conceptual meanings.2 Though we think that for a polysemy to be considered regular, the pattern has to extend to more than one other term.3 We will keep using the label "inherent polysemy" to refer to cases that pass co-predication and anaphoric binding tests in a regular and stable way.…”

Las relaciones semánticas en la sufijación del español

“…Siguiendo a Fábregas (2015), estas posturas se pueden reducir a dos: una que denomina hyperspecification que «consists of attaching the morpheme to a list of (possibly but not necessarily) related meanings» y otra, en la que «the affix can be treated as being essentially empty in substantive meaning and let a constellation of factors [...] construct in more or less deterministic ways the meaning that the affix will display in a particular word» a la que denomina «underspecification». Vicente (2018) distingue, en la interpretación de la polisemia léxica, tres posturas: «Literalism», «Underspecification (thin) account», «Overspecification (rich) account». Reconoce que entre la primera y la tercera las fronteras son difusas, así que, al final, la situación en ambas disciplinas parece ser muy semejante, aunque solo sirva para consuelo de morfólogos.…”

Analogical Cognition: an Insight into Word Meaning

“…5;, though for criticism, now see Carston 2016;Recanati 2004, ch. 9;Vicente 2018). But these discussions have not been supported by reference to analogical cognition.…”