Polysemy

Abstract

A word is said to be polysemous when it is associated with two or several related senses (e.g., a straight line/a washing on a line/a line of bad decisions; lose a wallet/lose a relative; a handsome man/a handsome gift). It is distinguished from monosemy, where a word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings (e.g., the ‘financial institution’ and ‘riverside’ meanings of bank). Although the distinctions between polysemy, monosemy, and homonymy may seem clear at an intuitive level, they have proven difficult to draw in practice. Some problems are how to count senses or meanings; how to decide whether two senses are related, and in which way they are related; and how to tell apart polysemy from pragmatic effects that affect lexical meanings. Some tests have been proposed in the literature, but such tests do not give uniform results, in part because there are different ways in which an expression can be polysemous. There is an emerging consensus concerning the following “minimal” taxonomy of polysemy, such that the polysemy a word displays can belong to at least one of the following patterns: (i) irregular or accidental polysemy (e.g.,The Sun is a star/Mary is a star), (ii) regular polysemy (e.g., catch the rabbit/order the rabbit), and (iii) logical or inherent polysemy (e.g., The book is interesting/the book is heavy). The current literature approaches polysemy from different perspectives and research traditions, including lexicography, formal semantics, cognitive linguistics, distributional semantics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics.