| Summary: | Polysemy is a semantic phenomenon which occurs when one lexical item has more
meanings which can be seen as related to each other. It is to be
distinguished from the other extreme pole of ambiguity, homonymy, which
occurs when two or more unrelated meanings are by means of an etymological
accident tied to the same orthographic and/or phonological form. Even though
polysemy can be considered as a non-issue, since discourse easily solves all
of the problems of possible ambiguity for use in everyday language use,
accounting for it (in an systematic manner) in terms of how polysemy is
represented in the mental lexicon and how to account for the criteria
governing the meaning distinctions and the interaction of meanings, for
example, is a challenge still not fully met. The paper first gives an
overview of the existing theoretical accounts of polysemy which arose over
the course of the last two centuries to meet one of the said challenges,
namely how polysemy is represented in our minds. The discussion is followed
up by a conclusion of the predominant and most plausible theoretical view on
multiple meanings stemming from the presented philosophical, semantic, and
cognitive frameworks and models.
|
|---|
