POLYSEMI

 POLYSEMI

What is polysemi ?

Polysemy is the capacity for a sign (such as a word, phrase, or symbol) to have multiple meanings (that is, multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses), usually related by contiguity of meaning within a semantic field.

It is thus usually regarded as distinct from homonymy, in which the multiple meanings of a word may be unconnected or unrelated.

Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins’ definition stipulates three elements:

(i)                 the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin

(ii)                the links between these senses form a network, and

(iii)             understanding the ‘inner’ one contributes to understanding of the ‘outer’ one.

Polysemy is a pivotal concept within disciplines such as media studies and linguistics. The analysis of polysemy, synonymy, and hyponymy and hypernymy is vital to taxonomy and ontology in the information-science senses of those terms. It has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation and schemas.

polysemy, language scientific term for ambiguity, see adjective green in the green gate, green thumb, green student, green policy, where the word's meaning varies, often due. metaphorical extensions.

Examples and Observations

1.Kitchens
"Now, the kitchen was the room in which we were sitting, the room where Mama did hair and washed clothes, and where each of us bathed in a galvanized tub. But the word has another meaning, and the 'kitchen' I'm speaking of now is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of the head, where the neck meets the shirt collar. If there ever was one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen."
(Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
 

2.Banks, Pupils, and Bats
Sports Illustrated can be bought for 1 dollar or 35 million dollars; the first is something you can read and later start a fire with, the second is a particular company that produces the magazine you just read. Such polysemy can give rise to a special ambiguity (He left the bank five minutes ago, He left the bank five years ago). Sometimes dictionaries use history to decide whether a particular entry is a case of one word with two related meanings, or two separate words, but this can be tricky. Even though pupil (eye) and pupil (student) are historically linked, they are intuitively as unrelated as bat (implement) and bat (animal)."
(Adrian Akmajian, et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. MIT Press, 2001)