Languages & Linguistics
Polysemy
Polysemy refers to the phenomenon in language where a single word has multiple related meanings. These meanings may be distinct but connected through a common underlying concept. Polysemy is a common feature in natural languages and contributes to the richness and flexibility of language use.
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10 Key excerpts on "Polysemy"
eBook - ePub- Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak, Ewa Dąbrowska, Dagmar Divjak(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Stefan Th. GriesChapter 2: Polysemy
Stefan Th. Gries, Santa Barbara, United States of America1 The notion of Polysemy
The probably most widely accepted definition of Polysemy is as the form of ambiguity where 2+ related senses are associated with the same word; consider the meanings of glass in I emptied the glass (‘container’) and I drank a glass (‘contents of the container’). Ever since this notion was proposed by Bréal (1897), it has been puzzling researchers from many disciplines: linguists, lexicographers, psycholinguists, psychologists, computer scientists, etc. In the componential Classical Theory of Meaning (Katz and Fodor 1963; Katz 1967 ), (i) meanings1 of words were defined on the basis of necessary and sufficient conditions (or features/markers) without reference to contexts, (ii) therefore, a particular entity was either a full member of the category defined by a word or not, and (iii) the similarity of meanings of different words, or senses of the same word, could be quantified by counting the number of features/markers shared by meanings/senses. Thus, a word was ambiguous if it had more than one definition using such features (where no distinction between different kinds of ambiguity − homonymy and Polysemy − was made).Cognitive linguistics (CL), or cognitive semantics, drew on research in philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive psychology and adopted a perspective in which Polysemy became an omnipresent property associated with lexical items but also morphemes, grammatical constructions, and whole grammatical classes. Section 2 sketches the development of Polysemy in CL. Section 3 explores how Polysemy was addressed in neighboring fields (psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics), and section 4 points out desiderata for future CL research on Polysemy.
eBook - PDFHistorical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionary Research
Papers from the International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, at the University of Leicester, 2002
- Julie Coleman, Anne McDermott, Julie Coleman, Anne McDermott(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Robert E. Lewis, University of Michigan ASPECTS OF Polysemy IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH DICTIONARY Polysemy is a multi-faceted term, and it would be impossible to deal with it fully in a short paper such as this, even when the subject matter is restricted to Middle English or, more specifically, to the Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED). Instead, I will confine myself to some general remarks on the subject and on the MED's treatment of it and then go on to some more detailed observations on the ordering of senses in the MED and on how that both differs from and is similar to the ordering of senses in other English historical and period dictionaries. Polysemy, in spite of its technical-sounding name, is not an especially mysterious or difficult term: it refers simply to the fact or state of a word's having multiple meanings and applies, I feel certain, to the majority of words in the English language. I will not concern myself here with the Polysemy that crosses part-of-speech lines (for example, walk v. vs. walk n.): that kind is fairly easy to deal with, being divided into separate entries in historical and unabridged dictionaries of English and usually into separate sections by part of speech within an entry in desk dictionaries. Rather I will concern myself with the more general (and subtle) variety of Polysemy, the variety within the same word or part of speech. This manifests itself first of all in the way in which the lexicographer separates what he (or she) considers to be discrete senses, which will depend, in turn, on the nature and the amount of data he has at his disposal, and also on the kind of dictionary he is writing. There are some standard ways in dictionaries to differentiate senses.
- Michel Achard, Susanne Niemeier(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
A Cognitive Linguistic View of Polysemy in English and its Implications for Teaching Szilvia Csabi 1. Introduction The present paper deals with the method of vocabulary teaching, using the principles developed in cognitive linguistics. The focus is on Polysemy and its implications for teaching English as a second language. Cognitive linguistic research on Polysemy (i.e., "the association of two or more related senses with a single linguistic form" [Taylor 1989: 99]) has suggested that the meaning structure of polysemous words is motivated and can be accounted for in a systematic way. This insight can be employed in applied linguistics and can be put to use in teaching as well as learning foreign languages. The claim proposed here is that teachers' and learners' awareness of the cognitive mechanisms making up the network of senses is useful in the lan- guage learning process. It is not claimed here that traditional vocabulary learning processes, such as memorization, should be replaced. Rather, the point of the study is to support the idea that, besides memorization, awareness and acquisition of the cognitive structure of word meanings aids teaching and learning. Words with several senses often cause problems for teachers and learners of English since they are often seen as unrelated and unsystematic. This belief probably discourages teachers and students to deal with polysemous words in the classroom. The strategy commonly employed by teachers is to not deal with the various senses of a certain word all at once, but to explain the specific senses when they turn up. However, a more fruitful strategy, result- ing in the easier mastery of the target language, would be to provide the explanations and motivations for the related senses of given words together.
eBook - PDFCognitive Linguistics
Current Applications and Future Perspectives
- Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven, Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven, Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Polysemy and the lexicon 51 Polysemy and the lexicon John R. Taylor Abstract In this paper I take issue with the standard view of Polysemy as the association of a single word-form with a multitude of distinct meanings. First, I review different approaches to Polysemy, concluding that it may not be legitimate to attempt to de-termine just how many meanings a word has, and what these meanings might be. I suggest that such a programme may be the outgrowth of a particular conception of language, which I characterize as the “dictionary+grammar book” model. This model is undermined by the pervasiveness of the idiomatic in language. The matter is illustrated by a corpus-based study of (some uses of) the expression all over . The expression has a range of uses which cannot be derived on the basis of independently identifiable meanings of its parts. All over , in turn, participates in larger expressions whose semantic values likewise cannot be compositionally de-rived. The “creative” extension of these idiomatic uses is also documented. These findings lend support to the view that knowing a word involves knowing the usage range of the word, rather than through the association of the word with a fixed number of determinate meanings. Keywords : Polysemy; lexicon; polyseme; metonymy; idiom; construction; creativ-ity; compositionality; network 1. How many meanings? Some years ago I wrote a paper entitled “How many meanings does a word have?” (Taylor 1992). I began by juxtaposing some remarks by John Searle on the verb to open and observations by George Lakoff on the word window . x Lakoff (1987: 416) pointed out that window can be used to refer to dif-ferent categories of things. If someone throws a rock and breaks a window, what is broken is (most probably) a glass panel, whereas if someone paints a window, what they paint is (most probably) the wooden structure encasing the glass panels.
eBook - PDFThe Semantics of Polysemy
Reading Meaning in English and Warlpiri
- Nick Riemer(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The dichotomy between monosemy and Polysemy is therefore not a false one, since 124 Evidence for Polysemy monosemy and Polysemy name the only two logical possibilities for the structure of a lexical category on a given level of lexical abstraction. This chapter reviews the results of recent research and motivates the ap-proach to meaning-division adopted in this book. It begins by considering the justification for the widely made assumption that Polysemy is the de-fault case in semantic representation, and argues that Polysemy must be seen simply as a guiding interpretative perspective rather than as a hypothe-sis whose truth can be empirically demonstrated (section two). Section three considers the criteria that have been advanced to discriminate be-tween monosemous and polysemous/homonymous words, demonstrating that all of them are inadequate on their own terms, regardless of the extent to which their results are mutually incompatible. Only the definitional crite-rion, however, gives access to the actual semantic content of words, and it is therefore the one adopted in this study. This is followed by an explora-tion of the multiplicity of definitional possibilities for a single Warlpiri verb, pakarni ‘hit’, which concludes that the delimitation of the number of word senses is always at the mercy of the metalanguage chosen for the analysis, and therefore open to potentially unlimited different analyses (sec-tion 3.5). To balance this scepticism, the last part of the chapter advances an interpretation of metaphor and metonymy which preserves some of their explanatory potential even in spite of the indeterminacy of the metalinguis-tic glossing on which they depend. To achieve this, it attempts to distin-guish the varying degrees of psychological reality that can be attributed to glosses belonging to a number of different epistemic kinds (section 4).
eBook - PDFThe Extent of the Literal
Metaphor, Polysemy and Theories of Concepts
- M. Rakova(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
9 Polysemy in Lexical Semantics 9.1 Semantics and conceptual structure: the beginnings A good while before cognitive linguistics became popular, lexical semanticists (at least some of them) began to develop an interest in con- cepts and conceptual structure. In a book called Language and Perception (1976), George Miller and Philip Johnson-Laird proposed to give a psy- chological theory of semantics, in which the relationship between per- ceptual and lexical structures is mediated by the conceptual structure. Conceptual thought is that which relates perception and language: '[p]ercepts and words are merely avenues into and out of this concep- tual structure' (p. vii). The reason that Miller and Johnson-Laird directed their attention to concepts is precisely the one that we find today in many research pro- grams: if words such as 'red', 'loud', 'sour', and so on are found across languages, and since perception and cognition cannot be separated, then there must be some real physiological and psychological processes correlated with their use. Although not all theorists regard such entities as truly perceptual, one can still take them to be 'the basic atoms of the mind'. The conceptual structure is grounded in perception: perceptual properties and relations are conceptually represented in the form of predicates. The widespread phenomenon of Polysemy is a puzzle for any theorist who attempts to offer generalizations concerning the use of a poly- semous word. What drives a Polysemy theorist is the belief that different uses of a polyseme have to be related in some unarbitrary way. Introducing the notion of conceptual structure/mental representation into semantics gives one the tools to offer such generalizations. Miller and Johnson-Laird were primarily concerned with verbal Polysemy (for 118
- Martin Pütz, René Dirven, Martin Pütz, René Dirven(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
From one meaning to the next: The effects of polysemous relationships in lexical learning* Steven Frisson, Dominiek Sandra, Frank Brisard, and Hubert Cuyckens 1. Introduction The concept of Polysemy has received considerable attention in cognitive linguistics (CL). Indeed, it is probably fair to say that linguists have never before been so preoccupied with this phenomenon. Furthermore, the degree of Polysemy characterizing individual lexical items in CL analyses such as Brugman's (1981) pioneering work on the preposition over has not been witnessed in earlier linguistic work. The main purpose of CL analyses such as Brugman's is twofold: (i) make an inventory of all senses of a lexical item and (ii) determine the interrelatedness of the various senses, i.e. show how one sense is sanc-tioned by the existence of another. A major claim is that cognitive principles govern the process of meaning extension. In an attempt to model the product of their analyses, linguists have appealed to the concept of a network structure, whose architecture consists of two kinds of entities: nodes, which represent senses, and links or connections between nodes, which represent cognitive principles underlying semantic extension. The number of intervening links between any two nodes and the strength of these links are expected to account for the cognitive distance between two senses of a polysemoiis item. Evidently, linguists are free to choose their own object of study and representational device, and there are several reasons why the network structure used in CL may be expected to yield new insights. However, there is more to cognitive-linguistic networks than meets the eye. Although the purpose of network analyses in CL is essentially a linguistic one, i.e. the semantic analysis of a lexical item, the theoretical framework in which the enterprise is embedded is strongly committed to a specific view on the relationship between language and cognition.
eBook - PDF- Ladislav Zgusta, Vera Cerny(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Therefore, what are concretizations for one scholar can be regarded as contextual nuances by another. For instance, cf. the following two sentences: My fork is broken, give me a good one, please; I am rather wet after the walk, I would like to have a good fire in the bedroom to-day. Though the concrete qualities of a good fork are vastly different from those of a good fire, my opinion would be that neither sentence shows a contextual nuance of the word good; it seems that we have to do with cases of concreti-zation of general meaning by application in different contexts, by reference to different denotata. But opinions may differ on the matter. The lexicographer should not be disgusted by all these possibilities of differ-ent conceptions and classifications; they are caused by the generality of LEXICAL MEANING 73 lexical meaning the description and presentation of which is one of the lexico-grapher's tasks. In all these four categories, it is the lexical meanings of the words which interact in the context; therefore, we can call it the lexical context and see in it a species of the verbal context. 1.5.8 Taken on the whole, Polysemy will always prove a hard riddle for the lexicographer. He will be forced to study it not only from the point of view of pure semantics, by analyzing the lexical meaning of isolated words itself, basically in the categories suggested here, but also from the point of view of the grammatical and the semantic combinations and combinatorial possibilities of the words. Because of Polysemy, we will have to give our original diagram (fig. 3) a more complicated form: --7 / Fig. 6 On the level of the system, meaning is shown as having a certain extension and as consisting of discernably different senses: the direct, around the direct the transferred and figurative ones, with the small dots of the specialized senses; the whole area of meaning is not covered by the sub-areas of the senses.
eBook - PDFEnglish Computer Corpora
Selected Papers and Research Guide
- Stig Johansson, Anna-Brita Stenström, Stig Johansson, Anna-Brita Stenström(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Polysemy and vagueness of meaning descriptions 109 descriptions with their number of senses according to the Longman dictionary of contemporary English. The list is ordered according to the frequency of the words as kernels of the meaning descriptions {person most frequent and object least frequent). Table 2 Kernel No. of senses as entry word Kernel No. of senses as entry word person 7 apparatus 4 place 19 plant 4 man 14 animal 4 instrument 3 money 2 machine 5 rank 4 substance 5 work 6 woman 6 meat 4 area 4 food 3 room 5 liquid 5 time 19 fruit 6 thing 13 object 5 body 10 Apparently, there is not only a strong correlation between frequency of use and restriction on formal context (the more frequently a word is used the more it occurs in different syntactic environments) but also between frequency of use and degree of Polysemy. Similar figures can be given for verbs and adjectives (see appendix). In the following, however, I will restrict myself to nouns. 3. General points of view with regard to Polysemy In general, the phenomenon of Polysemy can be viewed in two ways: 1. The theoretical point of view: there is one (occasionally more than one) basic sense; other senses are derived from the basic sense(s) as metaphoric (eg. fox referring to a person) or metonymic (eg. hand referring to a worker) extensions and can be described by rules. (Aarts and Calbert 1979) 2. The practical point of view: not all distinctions between senses in the practice of dictionaries are equally defensible. It is a matter of opinion 110 Piek Vossen whether a new context in which a word occurs also yields a new sense or meaning of that word. In a number of cases the distinctions are vague, unclear and only the examples given make them acceptable for a human reader. (Pustojevsky — Anick 1988) Aarts and Calbert describe a system in which the semantics of adjective-noun combinations is formalized.
eBook - PDFLEXeter '83: proceedings
Papers from the International Conference on Lexicography at Exeter, 9–12 September 1983
- Reinhard R. K. Hartmann, Exeter> LEXeter LEXeter <1983(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Penelope F. Stock Polysemy Introduction The aspect of Polysemy which I wish to address in this paper concerns the issue of how working lexicographers divide lexical items or words into different, usually, numbered, meanings. It is not infrequently stated that lexicographers are somewhat shy of explaining their own techniques - or are perhaps too busy to do so - or even that they are unaware of what they are doing, working from some intuition that cannot be stated. The most recent discussion that I am aware of on the subject of sense division is that by John Ayto (1983). In his paper Ayto gives an account of one accepted working method.^ His argument is as follows: firstly the lexicographer should consider the superordinates of each of the meanings of the lexical item (that is, the appropriate genus word which will be selected on which to base an analytic definition). This is, so to speak, the first sifting process: where meanings require quite distinct genus words they are ipso facto different senses. If one meaning of fly has the general superordinate term 'move through the air' and one has the superordinate 'an insect', then they are clearly different senses of fly. Distinct superordinates or genus words suggest distinct senses. The second move is to disambiguate those meanings which have the same superordinate. Ayto uses cup as an example, in which several meanings may have definitions which begin with the same genus word: 'vessel'. These are two or three differently described vessels for drinking liquids from, and the sports trophy. The second sifting process takes place when the lexicographer considers the various differentiae that will be required in a definition to distinguish these meanings from each other such that, for example, the sports trophy has a differ-ent function from other cups, is differently shaped, and so on.
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