Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Interpretation of Copredicative Sentences: A Rich Underspecification Account of Polysemy

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 27))

Abstract

It is still an open question how senses of inherent polysemous words are represented and interpreted. Empirical results are not conclusive about the representation of polysemy. Therefore, different representation models try to give an answer about the puzzle of representation of polysemous words in general and of inherent polysemous words in particular. Inherent polysemous words are those that have several related senses that allow copredication, which occurs when one polysemous word is used to express simultaneously two (or more) related senses in a sentence. Ortega-Andrés and Vicente (Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1), 2019) propose a rich semantic approach that explains the interpretation of copredicative sentences. This chapter has three goals: (1) I discuss and classify underspecification approaches about the representation of polysemous words; (2) I analyze some empirical results and their contributions to the debate about the representation of polysemy and inherent polysemy; and (3) I argue that the rich account that Ortega-Andrés and Vicente give a plausible explanation about the representation of inherent polysemous words.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The distinction between conventional and non conventional polysemy is similar to the distinction between semantic polysemy and pragmatic polysemy (see Gibbs and Gerrig 1989; Falkum 2011). It is based on the idea that conventional senses are those that have been lexicalized or encoded in the mental lexicon after a process of conventionalization (Carston 2015). Once they have been lexicalized, they only have to be selected from a list of words when the interpreter encounters the word. On the contrary, when the hearer encounters a new sense of a word, it has to be pragmatically generated (Carston 2013; Recanati 2004). Following this idea, the label “conventional polysemous word” is not essential to the words themselves: most open-class words are conventionally polysemous because they have many different related and conventional senses.

  2. 2.

    According to Apresjan (1974) the polysemy of a word a with the senses Ai and Aj is regular if there exists at least one word b with the related senses Bi and Bj, being semantically distinguished in exactly the same way as Ai and Aj. For example:

    1. (a)

      The manifesto was signed by the University

    2. (b)

      I have a meeting with Laura at the university.

    3. (c)

      The school caught fire.

    4. (d)

      The school celebrates the end of the year party tomorrow.

    In (a) the word University has the meaning “people that work or represent an University- institution”; while in (c), school means the group of people that work/represent the school-institution. In (b), university means the building of the university and in (d) school also means the building of the school. Those are different regular polysemous words that have two related senses that are related in the same way.

  3. 3.

    The distinction between polysemy and homonymy has been widely discussed by linguists, philosophers and psychologists. Traditionally, the main difference is that senses or meanings of homonymous words are not related (apart from historically), while senses of polysemous words are related (see Falkum 2011). Most of dictionaries differentiate polysemy and homonymy by introducing them in different entries. For example:

    • Bank1: (a) slope of land that borders water.

    • Bank2: (a) an institution; (b) a building.

    The words bank1 and bank2 are homonymous: they have the same word-form (phonetics and spelling), but different meanings that are unrelated. In contrast, the word bank2 is polysemous, because the two senses of the word (a and b) are somehow related: the building is the place where the events and activities that are involved the institution take place.

    However, the distinction seems not to be so strict. It is always possible for someone to intuitively see a relation between two senses while some other people do not see that relation. The classification between more related senses and less related senses does not seem to be so categorical. What is clear is that a word form can have a huge range of different meanings and some of them are going to be “semantically closer” than others.

  4. 4.

    According to GL, the meaning of verbs is thin (see also footnote 5), while the meaning of nouns is very rich. Therefore, GL explains phrasal meanings using a compositional mechanisms, between verbs and nominals: the meaning of baking the potato and baking the cake is a result of interaction between the rich meaning of the noun, and the thin meaning of the verb.

  5. 5.

    Moreover, there are some problematic cases. The word newspaper has been thought has having two structure: the “paper” structure and the “institution” structure. If that was the case, they should not copredicate, however, there are some particular cases in which they copredicate:

    1. (a)

      ? The newspaper fired its editor and fell off the table

    2. (b)

      ? That newspaper is owned by a trust and is covered with coffee.

    3. (c)

      John used to work for the newspaper that you are reading.

    4. (d)

      The newspaper has been attacked by the opposition and publicly burned by demonstrators.

    There are some cases in which the senses “institution” and “content” also copredicare. Sentences (a) and (b) are usually taken to be bad, while (c) and (d) are regarded as better or even good. According to some researchers (Arapinis and Vieu 2015; Ortega-Andrés and Vicente 2019) there are two structures involved. So, there are two inherent polysemous words: newspaper as institution and newspaper as text or printed paper. Following the GL, Arapinis and Vieu (2015) propose that the aspect of newspaper as institution is accessible via the agentive qualia of newspaper as copy, which specifies how the copy was created, and, conversely, the copy aspect is accessible from the telic quale of the newspaper as institution, which specifies what the institution is for.

References

  • Apresjan, Ju. D. (1974). Regular polysemy. Linguistics, 12(142). https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1974.12.142.5.

  • Arapinis, A., & Vieu, L. (2015). A plea for complex categories in ontologies. Applied Ontology, 10(3–4), 285–296. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-150156.

  • Beretta, A., Fiorentino, R., & Poeppel, D. (2005). The effects of homonymy and polysemy on lexical access: An MEG study. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(1), 57–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.12.006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blutner, R. (1998). Lexical pragmatics. Journal of Semantics, 15(2), 115–162.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blutner, R. (2004). Pragmatics and the lexicon. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 488–514). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

    Google Scholar 

  • Carston, R. (2013). Word meaning, what is said and explicature. In C. Penco & F. Domaneschi (Eds.), What is said and what is not (pp. 175–204). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carston, R. (2015). Contextual adjustment of meaning. In N. Riemer (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of semantics (pp. 195–210). New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carston, R. (2016). The heterogeneity of procedural meaning. Lingua, 175–176(May), 154–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.12.010.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Falkum, I. L. (2011). The semantics and pragmatics of polysemy: A relevance- theoretic account. London, UK: University College London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Falkum, I. L. (2015). The how and why of polysemy: A pragmatic account. Lingua, 157, 83–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.11.004.

  • Falkum, I. L., & Vicente, A. (2015). Polysemy: Current perspectives and approaches. Lingua, 157, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.02.002.

  • Foraker, S., & Murphy, G. L. (2012). Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance. Journal of Memory and Language, 67(4), 407–425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.07.010.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1990). Taking on semantic commitments: Processing multiple meanings vs. multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 29(2), 181–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(90)90071-7.

  • Frisson, S. (2009). Semantic underspecification in language processing. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00104.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frisson, S. (2005). About bound and scary books: The processing of book polysemies. Lingua, 157, 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.017.

  • Frisson, S., & Frazier, L. (2005). Carving up word meaning: Portioning and grinding. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(2), 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2005.03.004.

  • Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2001). Obtaining a figurative interpretation of a word: Support for underspecification. Metaphor and Symbol, 16(3–4), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2001.9678893.

  • Gibbs, R., & Gerrig, R. (1989). How context makes metaphor comprehension seem ‘special’. Metaphor and Symbol, 4(3), 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms0403_3.

  • Hogeweg, L. (2012). Rich lexical represe ntations and conflicting features. International Review of Pragmatics, 4(2), 209–231. https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-00040205.

  • Katz, J. (1972). Semantic theory. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, Devorah E, & Murphy, Gregory L. (2001). The representation of polysemous words. Journal of Memory and Language, 45(2), 259–282. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2001.2779.

  • Klein, D. E., & Murphy, G. L. (2002). Paper has been my ruin: Conceptual relations of polysemous senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 47(4), 548–570. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00020-7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klepousniotou, E. (2002). The processing of lexical ambiguity: Homonymy and polysemy in the mental lexicon. Brain and Language, 81(1–3), 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.2001.2518.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klepousniotou, E., & Baum, S. R. (2007). Disambiguating the ambiguity advantage effect in word recognition: An advantage for polysemous but not homonymous words. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2006.02.001.

  • Klepousniotou, E., Titone, D., & Romero, C. (2008). Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(6), 1534–1543. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Murphy, E. (2019). Acceptability properties of abstract senses in copredication. In M. Bolognesi & G. Steen (Eds.), Perspectives on Abstract Concepts: Cognition, language and communication, (pp. 145–165). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ortega-Andrés, M., & Vicente, A. (2019). Polysemy and co-predication. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 84(3). https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.564.

  • Patterson, K., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2016). The hub-and-spoke hypothesis of semantic memory. In G. Hickok & S. Small (Ed.,), Neurobiology of language (pp. 765–775). New York, NY: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pickering, M., & Frisson, S. (2001). Processing ambiguous verbs: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(2), 556–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.27.2.556.

  • Pickering, M., McElree, B., Frisson, S., Chen, L., & Traxler, M. (2006). Underspecification and aspectual coercion. Discourse Processes, 42(2), 131–155. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326950dp4202_3.

  • Pietroski, P. (2005). Meaning before truth. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: Knowledge, meaning, and truth (pp. 255–302). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pietroski, P. (2008). Minimalist meaning, internalist interpretation. Biolinguistics, 2(4), 317–341.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pylkkänen, L., Llinás, R., & Murphy, G. L. (2006). The representation of polysemy: MEG evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(1), 97–109. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892906775250003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rabagliati, H., & Snedeker, J. (2013). The truth about chickens and bats: Ambiguity avoidance distinguishes types of polysemy. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1354–1360. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612472205.

  • Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Recanati, F. (2012). Compositionality, flexibility, and context dependence. In E. Machery, M. Werning, & W. Hinzen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compositionality (pp. 175–191). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruhl, C. (1989). On monosemy: A study in linguistic semantics. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Snowden, J. S., Thompson, J. C., & Neary, D. (2004). Knowledge of famous faces and names in semantic dementia. Brain, 127(4), 860–872. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awh099.

  • Spalek, A. (2012). Putting order into literal and figurative uses of verbs: “Romper” as a case study. Borealis–An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 1(2), 140–167. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.1.2.2341.

  • Tao Y. (2015). The neural representation of polysemy: The case of dot-objects. Doctoral dissertation, University of Trento.

    Google Scholar 

  • Travis, C. (2008). Occasion-sensitivity: Selected essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vicente A. (2019). Chomskyan arguments against truth-conditional semantics based on variability and co-predication. Erkenntnis, 84(3),1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00138-x.

  • Zahn, R., Moll, J., Paiva, M., Garrido, G., Krueger, F., Huey, E. D., & Grafman, J. (2009). The neural basis of human social values: Evidence from functional MRI. Cerebral Cortex, 19(2), 276–283. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhn080

Download references

Acknowledgements

Versions or parts of this paper were presented at the Seminars at University of the Basque Country’s SemLin and at the UCL. I am very grateful to audiences at those events, in particular to Tim Pritchard and Robyn Carston. My gratitude goes also to my colleagues Aitor Lidardi, Elena Castroviejo, Javier Ormazabal, Laura Vela-Plo Myriam Uribe-Etxeberria and, especially, to my supervisor Agustín Vicente who provided insightful comments.

Funding for this paper was provided by a FPI grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (BES-2015-071378) and the projects: PGC2018-093464-B-100 and IT1396-19

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Basque Country, Leioa, BI, Spain

    Marina Ortega-Andrés

Authors
  1. Marina Ortega-Andrés
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marina Ortega-Andrés .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Fabrizio Macagno

  2. University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ortega-Andrés, M. (2021). Interpretation of Copredicative Sentences: A Rich Underspecification Account of Polysemy. In: Macagno, F., Capone, A. (eds) Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56437-7_9

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation