Polysemy
Polysemy (
Polysemy is distinct from
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the three most polysemous words in English are run, put, and set, in that order.[4][5]
Polysemes
A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related, senses. Since the test for polysemy is the vague concept of the relatedness, judgments of polysemy can be difficult to make. Because applying pre-existing words to new situations is a natural process of language change, looking at words' etymology is helpful in determining polysemy but not the only solution; as words become lost in etymology, what once was a useful distinction of meaning may no longer be so. Some seemingly unrelated words share a common historical origin, however, so etymology is not an infallible test for polysemy, and dictionary writers also often defer to speakers' intuitions to judge polysemy in cases where it contradicts etymology.[6] English has many polysemous words. For example, the verb "to get" can mean "procure" (I'll get the drinks), "become" (she got scared), "understand" (I get it) etc.
In linear or vertical polysemy, one sense of a word is a subset of the other. These are examples of
- autohyponymy, where the basic sense leads to a specialised sense (from "drinking (anything)" to "drinking (alcohol)")
- automeronymy, where the basic sense leads to a subpart sense (from "door (whole structure)" to "door (panel)")
- autohyperonymy or autosuperordination, where the basic sense leads to a wider sense (from "(female) cow" to "cow (of either sex)")
- autoholonymy, where the basic sense leads to a larger sense (from "leg (thigh and calf)" to "leg (thigh, calf, knee and foot)")
In non-linear polysemy, the original sense of a word is used figuratively to provide a different way of looking at the new subject. Alan Cruse identifies three types of non-linear polysemy:[8]
- metonymy, where one sense "stands for" another (from "hands (body part)" to "hands (manual labourers)")
- metaphor, where there is a resemblance between senses (from "swallowing (a pill)" to "swallowing (an argument)")
- other construals (for example, from "month (of the year)" to "month (30 days)")
There are several tests for polysemy, but one of them is
The difference between
For Dick Hebdige,[16] polysemy means that, "each text is seen to generate a potentially infinite range of meanings," making, according to Richard Middleton,[17] "any homology, out of the most heterogeneous materials, possible. The idea of signifying practice—texts not as communicating or expressing a pre-existing meaning but as 'positioning subjects' within a process of semiosis—changes the whole basis of creating social meaning".
One group of polysemes are those in which a word meaning an activity, perhaps derived from a verb, acquires the meanings of those engaged in the activity, or perhaps the results of the activity, or the time or place in which the activity occurs or has occurred. Sometimes only one of those meanings is intended, depending on
Examples
- Man
-
- The human species (i.e., man vs. other organisms)
- Males of the human species (i.e., man vs. woman)
- Adult males of the human species (i.e., man vs. boy)
- (As a verb) to operate or constitute a vehicle or machine (To man a ship)
This example shows the specific polysemy where the same word is used at different levels of a
- Bank
-
- a financial institution
- the physical building where a financial institution offers services
- to deposit money or have an account in a bank (e.g. "I bank at the local credit union")
- a supply of something held in reserve: such as "banking" brownie points
- a synonym for 'rely upon' (e.g. "I'm your friend, you can bank on me"). It is different, but related, as it derives from the theme of security initiated by 1.
- However: 1 is borrowed from Italian banco, a money lender's bench, while a river bank is a native English word. Today they can be considered homonyms with completely different meanings. But originally they were polysemous, since Italian borrowed the word from a Germanic language. The Proto-Germanic cognate for "bank" is *bankiz.[19] A river bank is typically visually bench-like in its flatness.
Related ideas
A lexical conception of polysemy was developed by
Another clarification of polysemy is the idea of predicate transfer[22]—the reassignment of a property to an object that would not otherwise inherently have that property. Thus, the expression "I am parked out back" conveys the meaning of "parked" from "car" to the property of "I possess a car". This avoids incorrect polysemous interpretations of "parked": that "people can be parked", or that "I am pretending to be a car", or that "I am something that can be parked". This is supported by the morphology: "We are parked out back" does not mean that there are multiple cars; rather, that there are multiple passengers (having the property of being in possession of a car).
See also
- Amphiboly
- Aberrant decoding
- Ambiguous grammar
- Dog-whistle politics
- Essentially contested concept
- Heterosemy
- Homograph
- Idiom
- Metonymy
- Monosemy
- Polytely
- Pronoun game
- Pun
- Semantic change
- Euphemism treadmill
- Syncretism (linguistics)
- Syntactic ambiguity
- Troponymy
References
- ^ "polysemous". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition). 2000. Archived from the original on 28 June 2008.
- ^ "definition of polysemy". Oxford Dictionaries Online.[dead link]
- ^ ISBN 978-0-19-977281-0, retrieved 2022-06-06
- ^ Simon Winchester, “Has 'run' run amok? It has 645 meanings… so far”. NPR, 30 May 2011.
- ^ Brandon Specktor, “The most complicated word in English is only three letters long”, Reader's Digest, 9 Nov 2022.
- ^ ISSN 0749-596X. Retrieved 2023-06-25.
- ^ Koskela, Anu (2005). "On the distinction between metonymy and vertical polysemy in encyclopaedic semantics". Sussex Research Online. Retrieved 30 June 2014.
- ^ a b Cruse, D Alan (2000). "Contextual variability". Meaning in Language. Oxford University Press.
- .
- doi:10.1037/a0020475
- ^ Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Metheun.
- ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
- ISBN 9780191584695.
- ^ (Etymology on etymonline.com): Bank "earthen incline, edge of a river", c. 1200, probably in Old English but not attested in surviving documents, from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse banki, Old Danish banke "sandbank," from Proto-Germanic *bangkon "slope," cognate with *bankiz "shelf".
- ^ Nicholas Ostler, B.T.S. Atkins "Predictable Meaning Shift: Some Linguistic Properties of Lexical Implication Rules" (1991) Proceedings of the First SIGLEX Workshop on Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation, Springer-Verlag.
- ISBN 978-3-030-35280-6.
- .
Further reading
- Joordens S, Besner D (1994). "When banking on meaning is not (yet) money in the bank: Explorations in connectionist modeling". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 20 (5): 1051–1062. .
- Kawamoto AH, Farrar WT, Kello CT (1994). "When two meanings are better than one: Modeling the ambiguity advantage using a recurrent distributed network". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 20 (6): 1233–1247. .
- Borowsky R, Masson ME (1996). "Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 22: 63–85. .
- Jastrzembski JE (1981). "Multiple meanings, number of related meanings, frequency of occurrence, and the lexicon". Cognitive Psychology. 13 (2): 278–305. S2CID 54346331.
- Rubenstein H, Garfield L, Millikan (1970). "Homographic entries in the internal lexicon". Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. 9 (5): 487–494. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(70)80091-3.)
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - O'Sullivan; et al. (1994). Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06173-5.
- Jamet, Denis (Ed.) (2008) "Polysemy", 1st issue of Lexis, E-Journal in English Lexicology.