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Topic: Polysemy

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	Polysemy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Polysemy (from the Greek πολυσημεία = multiple meaning) is the capacity for a sign to have multiple meanings.
		For Dick Hebdige (1979: 117) polysemy means, "each text is seen to generate a potentially infinite range of meanings," making, according to Middleton, "any homology, out of the most heterogeneous materials, possible.
		Some apparently unrelated words share a common historical origin, however, so etymology is not an infallible test for polysemy, and dictionary writers also often defer to speakers' intuitions to judge polysemy in cases where it contradicts etymology.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Polysemy (353 words)

	CoreLex: Systematic Polysemy and Underspecification (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		This thesis is concerned with a unified approach to the systematic polysemy and underspecification of nouns.
		Systematic polysemy -- senses that are systematically related and therefore predictable over classes of lexical items -- is fundamentally different from homonymy -- senses that are unrelated, non-systematic and therefore not predictable.
		The thesis establishes an ontology and semantic database (CoreLex) of 126 semantic types, covering around 40,000 nouns and defining a large number of systematic polysemous classes that are derived by a careful analysis of sense distributions in WordNet.
	www.cs.brandeis.edu /~paulb/thesis-abstract.html (344 words)

	LINGUIST List 14.2534: Computational Ling: Ravin & Leacock (2002)
		Polysemy in this paper is explored from a lexical-semantic point of view as the result of a ''wide spectrum of possibilities for context-dependency'' for individual words.
		Since polysemy from this point of view refers to the semantic nuances that are due to the presence and various configurations in the argument structure, Pustejovksi also proposes a typology of ''optionality'' of arguments, which defines the types of arguments that are optionally expressed in a predicate.
		This paper presents promising work in polysemy in a manner that is psychologically plausible, but it fails to view polysemy as a generalized phenomenon affecting natural language not only at word-level but also at a level of sentences and discourses.
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/14/14-2534.html (2814 words)

	Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology: Ambiguity and visual word recognition: Can feedback explain both homophone ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Hino and Lupker's (1996) explanation of polysemy effects is based on the notion that the nature of feedback to the orthographic units can influence lexical-decision performance, and in that and many other ways, it is very similar to the account proposed by Pexman et al.
		The first prediction arises from the fact that both polysemy and homophone effects are due to the structure of the system and not to the use of particular response strategies.
		We argue, instead, that homophone and polysemy effects arise whenever there is sufficiently extensive processing to allow phonological activation and semantic activation to provide feedback to, and influence activation of, the orthographic units.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_qa3690/is_199912/ai_n8858980/pg_2 (1399 words)

	English linguistic words polysemy, polysemous, and homonyms plus the blind men and the elephant by John Saxe
		The existence of polysemy has obvious dangers: it can make language rather slippery, so that in the course of a piece of reasoning we may be led astray because a key word in our argument is used with different meanings in different places.
		On the other hand, the kind of "play" that polysemy gives to language makes it easier to use: communication would really be too difficult if, in every utterance, we had to practice the strictness of definition demanded by mathematics or by symbolic logic.
		Dictionaries treat cases of multiple meanings either as polysemy or as homonymy, but in fact it is not always easy to decide which we are dealing with, and dictionaries sometimes differ in their decisions.
	www.wordfiles.info /word-file-blindmen-poem.html (1404 words)

	Semantics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The decompositional perspective towards meaning holds that the meaning of words can be analyzed by defining meaning atoms or primitives, which establish a language of thought.
		An area of study is the meaning of compounds, another is the study of relations between different linguistic expressions (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentric, and endocentric).
		Semantics includes the study of thematic roles, argument structure, and its linking to syntax.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Semantics (416 words)

	Chapter1: Literary Language/Instrumental Language
		This is not, of course, to suggest that orality precludes polysemy; and if the text is recited with any frequency (a la Homer), it has a greater capacity to support polysemy, as the audience will have opportunities to "look back" in the text.
		The continuum marked by the extremes of polysemy and monosemy is now available as a useful scale with which to evaluate individual texts according to their "openness" or "reserve of meanings." Yet the operational differences between the two varieties of language have not been fully determined.
		We may then define polysemy as a highly informative message, as well as the reverse, so that a highly informative message is the definition of polysemy.
	www.sp.uconn.edu /~jbl00001/FINCHAP1.htm (6004 words)

	Polysemy
		Polysemy refers to the concept of words with multiple meanings, such as "The child started to walk" and "My mother used to dance the Lambeth Walk".
		Although closely related in meaning to homonym, lexicographers distinguish between polysemes, different uses of the same word, as walk the dog, take a walk, Lambeth Walk, going walking, which they define in a single dictionary entry, and homonyms like fluke, which have multiple meanings and different etymologies, and are therefore separate definitions.
		The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
	www.ebroadcast.com.au /lookup/encyclopedia/po/Polysemy.html (124 words)

	The Theory of Polysemy
		The theory of polysemy says that texts allow a person to generate his or her own meaning from the text, which directly meets the needs of their own identity.
		Polysemy is the condition where there is more than one meaning for a text.
		This form of polysemy is likely to be planned by the author and result in two or more otherwise conflicting groups of readers converging in praise of the text.
	www.colostate.edu /Depts/Speech/rccs/theory19.htm (522 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Systematic polysemy raises a number of problems for lexicographers, particularly if dictionaries are to be modified to accommodate new types of users and new applications.
		Methodically deployed, the account of systematically polysemy that we have been presenting here leaves the lexicon looking a good deal sparer than would be permitted by common-sense lexicographical views of descriptive adequacy.
		So we may think of a license as a kind of lexical indexing of a certain regularity in the world (as speakers hold it to be), which permits the exploitation of that regularity for purposes of transfer.
	www-csli.stanford.edu /~nunberg/Euralex.html (3985 words)

	Alibris: Polysemy
		Polysemy is a term used in semantic and lexical analysis to describe a word with multiple meanings.
		In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure.
		Lexical ambiguity presents one of the most intractable problems for language processing studies and, not surprisingly, it is at the core of research in lexical semantics.
	www.alibris.com /search/books/subject/Polysemy (275 words)

	Logical polysemy, event and argument structure of some German shooting verbs
		The systematic polysemy of these verbs is treated by means of two generative procedures.
		Thanks are also due to Peter Pause and collaborators at the SFB 471 Project "Verbal Polysemy" for their interest (and patience) in discussing earlier versions of this paper and for their penetrating criticism.
		We assume for (25a) a situation, in which the pistol was loaded with a blank cartridge, but the speaker is unaware of this fact.
	www.geocities.com /Athens/Crete/1546/gl2001.htm (2847 words)

	Hypercritical \| Culture \| Narrative Control and Visual Polysemy: FOX Surveillance Specials and the Limits of ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		In theory, the observation of public spaces by powerful forces and the translation of that observation into material consequences is one way social control is maintained and order is enforced.
		Each of these viewers (and of course a single viewer might shift between any or all of these positions) is still potentially present for the advertisements that intervene and will likely return to television again--and therefore functionally serves the needs of the televisual apparatus.
		Polysemy is a financial asset for television, even when it does not benefit the hegemonic discourses that attempt to employ television as a mechanism of social control.
	communication.ucsd.edu /tlg/explanations/tvsurveillance.html (8127 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The most obvious differences between the lexical level and the conceptual level are synonymy, homography, polysemy, metaphors, and metonymy - all demonstrating structures that exist in one level, but not in the other.
		Polysemy, metaphor, and metonymy allow speakers, for example, to be creative, to relate concepts, and to connote associations to concepts.
		Polysemy and, to some extent, metaphor are visualized in their regularities and in their dependency on conceptual structures.
	www.upriss.org.uk /papers/iclc97abstr.html (391 words)

	Histogram Resources
		Moved the modifiers to a single lexicon so that we can create the polysemy counts and links to other modifiers within the lexicon when handed a WordNet (or other) processed file.
		With the addition of polysemy values, we can see that there are now promising results for getting frequency histograms of relevant modifiers.
		As a test proof, the results from last week are compared against those of this week that have the additional WordNet polysemy sense integrated.
	www.columbia.edu /~emz2101/03_6901_Files/06_filtering/06_filtering.htm (1186 words)

	Polysemizer (Ftrain.com)
		polysemy -- (the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used (in different contexts) to express two or more different meanings) (from WordNet.
		A polysemy count indicates how common a word is. Specifically, polysemy refers to how many different forms of a word are used in a language; "love" has a polysemy count of 6, because you can love cooking and children, make love, score 9 love in a game of squash, and so forth.
		Polysemy values are analogous to the "familiarity," and, for most words, familiarity and polysemy values are practically the same.
	www.ftrain.com /theory_ideas_polysemizer.html (398 words)

	John Benjamins: Book details for Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics [CILT 177]
		In Cognitive Linguistics, polysemy is regarded as a categorizing phenomenon; i.e., related meanings of words form categories centering around a prototype and bearing family resemblance relations to one another.
		Under this polysemy = categorization view, the scope of investigation has been gradually broadened from categories in the lexical and lexico-grammatical domain to morphological, syntactic, and phonological categories.
		A first set of papers analyzes the polysemy of such lexical categories as prepositions and scalar particles, and looks at the import of polysemy in frame-based dictionary definitions.
	www.benjamins.com /cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=CILT_177 (236 words)

	GermaNet Semantic Pointers
		For this reason, polysemy is intended to be treated in GermaNet by entering a separate record for each sense of a word at the appropriate location in the ontolology.
		A familiar type of regular polysemy is the "organization - building it occupies" polysemy, where the same lexical entity is systematically used to express an organization and it's building.
		As the Regular Polysemy Pointer is reversible and bidirectional, it is sufficient to mark only one element for a connected pair.
	www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /lsd/Pointers.html (1252 words)

	Tucson 2000 paper notes
		In examining cases of polysemy one quickly discovers an ill-understood borderline region between polysemy and univocality, and hence also between ambiguity and univocality.
		Within lexical semantics, homonyms are often treated as distinct lexical entries (lexemes), or words, in the mental lexicon; and cases of polysemy are taken as distinct senses associated with a single lexical entry.
		The problems with the homonymy-polysemy distinction notwithstanding, if we assume that the distinction is real, and ask in which category the alleged senses of ‘consciousness’ belong, the answer seems clear: they are cases of polysemy if ambiguity at all.
	research.haifa.ac.il /~antony/papers/Ambiguous.htm (10023 words)

	OUP: Polysemy: Ravin
		This volume of newly commissioned essays examines current theoretical and computational work on polysemy, the term used in semantic analysis to describe words with more than one meaning.
		Their authors describe the nature of polysemy, the criteria for detecting it, and its manifestations across languages.
		They examine the issues arising from the regularity of polysemy and the theoretical principles proposed to account for the interaction of lexical meaning with the semantics and syntax of the context in which it occurs.
	www.oup.co.uk /isbn/0-19-925086-3 (677 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		To clearly distinguish polysemy from homonymy, some GL researchers have called referred to it as as “Regular or Systematic Polysemy” (Lascarides & Copestake, 1998; Copestake, 1995) and “Complementary Polysemy” (Pustejovsky, 1995).
		For example, in the sentence “Mary likes to wear a rabbit,” the prototypical sense of the word rabbit, typically a subtype of mammal, is extended to fur, a subtype of skin.
		Pustejovsky (1995) calls this type of polysemy as “category changing.” We will use the terms constructional polysemy and sense extension to refer to the two subtypes of polysemy.
	www.aic.nrl.navy.mil /~aha/papers/Gupta-Aha-WGL03.doc (5253 words)

	LINGUIST List 5.25: Polysemy (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Just before Christmas I posted a query asking if there were any parallel polysemies or semantic changes between "meat" and "fish" as found in Australian Aboriginal languages in some areas, elsewhere in the world.
		The closest to a reply to my central query was Amy Auhrbach's reporting of the fact that "ikan" (generally "fish" in Indonesian) is used in some areas also to mean chicken meat (apparently not for "red" meat though).
		Whether there are more general reflections of this polysemy in Austronesian languages and whether its appearance correlates with a high-fish diet, I do not know.
	www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /linguist/issues/5/5-25.html (213 words)

	Literal-Minded: Fast-Food Polysemy (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		It's for this kind of almost-ambiguity that the word polysemy is used.
		When this person talks about a good place to eat, she really means it!" But of course they never mean anything as interesting as that; they just mean that they got their food there.
		I'm guessing that fast-food polysemy is more common when the food is taken to go than when it's eaten on site.
	literalmind.blogspot.com /2004/08/fast-food-polysemy.html (459 words)

	foamy custard: pluralism and polysemy
		One aspect of this is the widespread cynicism that this age group has for the purveyors of news and, predictably enough, the political activities associated with so much of this 'news'.
		If 'polysemy' carries the sense of more-or-less intentionally 'subversive' (or 'oppositional') alternative interpretations, 'pluralism' is a less emotive way of referring to the possibility (indeed, probability) that events can be seen in quite different ways depending on prior cultural assumptions.
		For example, academic archaeologists and historians have, over the last ten years or so, begun to wake up to the recognition that their 'privileged' views of the past may be widely different to popular perceptions.
	www.indigogroup.co.uk /foamycustard/fc041.htm (533 words)

	Language Log: You can call it x all you want
		I think a strict polysemy analysis of any of these examples (if one is even possible) is far more of a stretch than it is for the "...
		The way I'm defining it, the word substituting for x in the "that's why they call it x" snowclone is "strictly polysemous" if it has a generally agreed-upon set of senses (as defined, say, by a dictionary), at least two of which can be convincingly argued to be invoked and compared/contrasted by the snowclone.
		What I'd like to suggest is a weaker, "loose polysemy" analysis of the "that's why they call it x" snowclone: two relevant senses are coerced for x, even when the two senses can't be matched up (by the listener) with generally agreed-upon senses of x.
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/002416.html (1034 words)

	Processing metonymic polysemy and homonymy in context: An electrophysiological investigation
		Psycholinguistic research has made enormous efforts to investigate the neurocognitive processes involved in lexical ambiguity resolution, however, this work has generally focused on homomyms (words with semantically distinct meanings such as “passage”, which may refer to a winding path or to a sequence of text).
		Other kinds of lexical ambiguity have been relatively ignored, such as polysemy (words with semantically related meanings such as “newspaper”, which may refer to the object that you read or to the institution that produces that object).
		These data lend support to the notion that the human brain represents and processes varied forms of lexical ambiguity in varied ways, and has implications for psycholinguistic models of language processing.
	www.science.mcmaster.ca /~BBCS/2005/viewpaper.php?id=150&print=1 (210 words)

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