Abstract
The goal of the present study was to investigate the interaction between different senses of polysemous nouns (metonymies and metaphors) and different meanings of homonyms using the method of event-related potentials (ERPs) and a priming paradigm. Participants read two-word phrases containing ambiguous words and made a sensicality judgment. Phrases with polysemes highlighted their literal sense and were preceded by primes with either the same or different – metonymic or metaphorical – sense. Similarly, phrases with homonyms were primed by phrases with a consistent or inconsistent meaning of the noun. The results demonstrated that polysemous phrases with literal senses preceded by metonymic primes did not differ in ERP responses from the control condition with the same literal primes. In contrast, processing phrases with the literal sense preceded by metaphorical primes resulted in N400 and P600 effects that might reflect a very limited priming effect. The priming effect observed between metonymic and literal senses supports the idea that these senses share a single representation in the mental lexicon. In contrast, the effects observed for polysemes with metaphorical primes characterize lexical access to the word’s target sense and competition between the two word senses. The processing of homonyms preceded by the prime with an inconsistent meaning, although it did not elicit an N400 effect, was accompanied by a P600 effect as compared to the control condition with a consistent meaning of the prime. We suppose that the absence of the N400 effect may result from inhibition of the target meaning by the inconsistent prime, whereas the P600 response might reflect processes of reanalysis, activation, and integration of the target meaning. Our results provide additional evidence for the difference in processing mechanisms between metonymies and metaphors that might have separate representations in the mental lexicon, although they are more related as compared to homonyms.
Highlights
Theoretical studies on ambiguous words traditionally distinguish between homonymy and polysemy (Lyons, 1977; Cruse, 1986)
Metonymy is motivated by contiguity: the shift from the original sense to a metonymic sense occurs within the same semantic domain, e.g., funny rabbit → tasty rabbit, where the focus of attention shifts from the whole animal to its particular part – meat
According to the statistical analysis of accuracy (Wilcoxon test for metonymic vs. literal and metaphorical vs. literal conditions with a Bonferroni correction of values of p), polysemous targets with metonymic and metaphorical primes did not differ from the control condition
Summary
Theoretical studies on ambiguous words traditionally distinguish between homonymy and polysemy (Lyons, 1977; Cruse, 1986). A word accidentally carries two or more unrelated meanings, e.g., bank 1 “a financial institution” and bank 2 “an area of land along the side of a river”; while in polysemy, a word has several related senses, e.g., funny rabbit “a small animal” and tasty rabbit “the meat from a rabbit.”. Two types of relations with the original literal sense can be distinguished: metonymy and metaphor (Apresjan, 1974; Pustejovsky, 1995; Geeraerts, 2010). Metonymy is motivated by contiguity: the shift from the original sense to a metonymic sense occurs within the same semantic domain, e.g., funny rabbit → tasty rabbit, where the focus of attention shifts from the whole animal to its particular part – meat. From the point of view of linguistic theory, literal and metaphorical senses are considered closer to homonyms than literal and metonymic senses (see Apresjan, 1974)
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