Abstract
Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6–12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses.
Highlights
Polysemy is one of the fundamental properties of the lexical system of a language
12When preparing this paper for publication, we discovered a possible confound in the stimuli: in eight words metonymic senses were derived from metaphorical senses while in the other 40 words metonymic senses were derived from literal senses
We first compare the experimental and the semantic similarity estimation results; we propose a view on how polysemous words might be stored in the mental lexicon, discuss the difference in the results for nouns and verbs vs. adjectives, and compare our findings to the results of the categorization task by Klein and Murphy (2002)
Summary
Polysemy is one of the fundamental properties of the lexical system of a language. The most common words of a language are polysemous; that is, they have a number of related senses (Zipf, 1945). Psycholinguistic research of polysemy addresses two major questions: how senses of a word are stored in the mental lexicon and how they are processed during language comprehension. While some studies argue in favor of separate sense storage (Klein and Murphy, 2001, 2002; Foraker and Murphy, 2012), others present evidence of sense overlap and underspecified core representations in the mental lexicon (Frazier and Rayner, 1990; Frisson and Pickering, 1999; Pickering and Frisson, 2001). The current study uses a semantic clustering approach to address the issue of whether different senses of polysemous words (Russian nouns, verbs, and adjectives) are stored as separate or shared mental representations
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