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Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

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Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning.

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Notes

  1. The more general view of Asher (2011) is more accurately classified as a mixed account: it is a literalist account for coercions and meaning shifts, but an over-specification (dot-object-ist) account as far as `inherent polysemy' is concerned. Note, incidentally, that the different theoretical approaches discussed here were developed to handle different phenomena, not necessarily as general approaches to lexical semantics.

  2. Note that this is a liberal use of Pustejovsky’s technical notion of aspect, which can give rise to occasional misunderstandings.

  3. Not all psycholinguists are convinced. Some authors (e.g., Klein and Murphy 2001, Foraker and Murphy 2012) advocate a SEL model. However, there seems to be emerging a consensus according to which the SEL model could be a good model only for distantly related senses (e.g. shredded paper vs liberal paper).

  4. Another example: ‘break’ typically admits the anticausative alternation (‘Jonh broke the window’/’the window broke’), but not always: ‘John broke the law’ is ok., but ‘the law broke’ is not (see Spalek 2015; Rappaport Hovav 2014).

  5. The translation of ‘cut the interest rates’, for instance is not ‘cortar los tipos de interés’ but ‘recortar los tipos de interés’.

  6. The proposal has problems, as when the cut is not controlled, as in ‘the rope cut’, or ‘se cortó la cuerda’ (Spanish). It is certainly difficult to find necessary conditions rather than prototypical conditions.

  7. See (Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 2013):

    a. … the rope cut on the rock releasing Rod on down the mountain. (http://www.avalanche-center.org/Incidents/1997-98/19980103a-Montana.php)

    b. …The sheath of the rope had cut on the edge of the overhang and slid down 2 feet. (www.rockclimbing.org/tripreports/elnino.htm)

    c. …The rope cut and the climber landed on his feet, stumbled backward and fell… (http://rockandice.com/articles/how-to-climb/article/1092-rope-choppedby-carabiner)

    d. Suddenly, the rope cut and he fell down the well. (http://www.englishforfun.bravehost.com/wishingwell.htm).

  8. The case is not limited to names of cities, countries, and similar entities, and the kinds of polysemy we have considered so far, though these are particularly illustrative. Many proper nouns enter into different patterns of regular polysemies (like the author-for-works-of-author pattern, or location-for-event pattern –this is a new Vietnam). Moreover, proper nouns of persons can be said to be able to refer to at least two different entities: the body and the person, as exemplified by the two different readings of John is very flexible, depending on the two different aspects associated to the proper name John (John, as a person, is very flexible; John, as a body, is very flexible). Concerning the adjective flexible, I would like to tell a story similar to that told about verbs: the specific senses it has in different utterances of John is flexible are related to the rich meaning provided by the noun.

  9. For more examples of the polysemy of mouth and its cognates in different languages, see Nissen (2011).

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Acknowledgements

This work benefited from comments from Andreas Brocher, Ingrid Lossius Falkum, Lotte Hogeweg, Marina Ortega, Tim Pritchard, Alexandra Spalek, and an anomymous reviewer. Research for this work was funded by Projects IT769-13 (Basque Government) and FFI2014-52196-P, of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO).

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Vicente, A. Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words. Philos Stud 175, 947–968 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0900-y

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