Polysemy: Current perspectives and approaches

Abstract

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 ...

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…On the one hand, thin meanings seem to play no role in the explanation of regular polysemy, which is an explanandum of any semantic theory. On the other, it is unlikely that we can find or construe an abstract representation which encompasses all the different senses of a regular polyseme (see also Falkum and Vicente, 2015;Vicente, 2017).…”

How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning Construction

“…Polysemy is an interesting phenomena of language and at least there are three approaches to it (Falkum and Vicente, 2015). While the rule-based and coercion accounts treat polysemy as linguistic phenomena, lexical pragmatic accounts downplay the contribution of the linguistic system and emphasise instead the communicative aspect of polysemy, treating it as being governed by pragmatic inferential processes applying at the level of individual words.…”

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

“…Literalism is partly endorsed by Asher (2011Asher ( , 2015, where, as mentioned, he tries to explain a good number of meaning variations in terms of coercion, as well as by representatives of Relevance Theory such as Falkum (2011Falkum ( , 2015, and Copestake and Briscoe's account of some regular polysemies (1992) (see Falkum and Vicente, 2015, for a review).…”