Abstract
We studied mental representations of literal, metonymically different, and metaphorical senses in Russian adjectives. Previous studies suggested that in polysemous words, metonymic senses, being more sense-related, were stored together with literal senses, whereas more distant metaphorical senses had separate representations. We hypothesized that metonymy may be heterogeneous with respect to its mental storage. “Whole-part” metonymy (“sad person” – “sad eyes”), which is cognitively closer to the literal sense and more regular, should be stored differently from temporal, causal or resultative metonymy (“sad person” – “sad time;” “sad person” – “sad news;” “lead.ADJ ball” – “lead.ADJ poisoning”), which is irregular and semantically distant from the literal sense. We conducted an online experiment with semantic clustering task in which the participants were asked to classify sentences with a literal, proximal metonymic, distal metonymic, or metaphorical sense of an adjective into virtual baskets so that sentences with the same perceived sense were put in the same basket. Our results showed that proximal metonymies were grouped together with the literal sense and with each other more often than with distal metonymies and metaphors. Distal metonymies, in turn, were grouped with literal senses more often than with metaphors. Overall, we concluded that literal senses and proximal metonymies were stored in single representations, distal metonymies formed hybrid representations with literal senses, and metaphors were stored separately from literal senses. Additionally, we discovered that perception of semantic differences is affected by the surrounding senses: distal metonymies were more discernible from literal senses when presented with proximal metonymies, and less so when presented with metaphors.
Highlights
IntroductionPolysemy is understood as the widespread phenomenon when words have multiple related senses that arise through processes of semantic change and extension of the literal meaning (such as birch tree vs. genealogical tree, free-range chicken vs. coconut curry chicken)
In theoretical linguistics, polysemy is understood as the widespread phenomenon when words have multiple related senses that arise through processes of semantic change and extension of the literal meaning
We suggest the following hypotheses regarding the mental representation of different senses in polysemous adjectives: (1) proximal metonymy should have a greater overlap with the literal sense than distal metonymy; (2) distal metonymy should have a greater overlap with the literal sense than metaphor; (3) proximal and distal metonymy should have a greater overlap with each other than any type of metonymy with metaphor
Summary
Polysemy is understood as the widespread phenomenon when words have multiple related senses that arise through processes of semantic change and extension of the literal meaning (such as birch tree vs. genealogical tree, free-range chicken vs. coconut curry chicken). Many experimental studies of both types of polysemy demonstrated that because of their greater relatedness to the literal sense, metonymy-based senses exhibited evidence of being stored together with the literal sense in the mental lexicon, in contrast to less related metaphors that were stored separately (Klepousniotou and Baum, 2007; MacGregor et al, 2015; Lopukhina et al, 2018). The existing experimental studies on polysemy do not reflect the complexity of this phenomenon in its entirety. Previous studies consider only coarsegrained distinctions between metonymy and metaphor Each of these two semantic extensions has more fine-grained subtypes which might conceivably be stored differently in the mental lexicon.
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