Polysemy and homophony

1. Introduction The aim of the annual essay is to analyze polysemy as a concept and as a “language phenomenon”. My annual essay consists of the introduction, seven parts, conclusions and the list of literature. Polysemy comes from Neo-Latin polysemia, which comes from Greek polusemous [poly- (many) + sema (sign)] giving us a linguistic term, "having many meanings" or multiple meanings. The words polysemy and polysemous are defined as "having or characterized by many meanings; the existence of several meanings for a single word or phrase". As said earlier, these terms refer to "words" or other "items of language with two or more senses" The study of polysemy or of the “multiplicity of meanings” of words has a long history in the philosophy of language, linguistics psychology and literature. The complex relations between meanings and words were first noted by the stoics (Robins 1967) they observed that a single concept can be expressed by several different words (synonymy) and that conversely, one word can carry different meanings (polysemy). It is an important means of enriching vocabulary. Polyseme is a word with multiple meanings, but all the meanings come from the same etymology. In Dictionaries and Lexicons, all the polysemes are listed under one heading. The most of English words are polysemantic, and only few are monosemantic- words having only one meaning, these are mainly scientific terms like oxygen molecule and the like. The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops gradually, over the centuries, as more and more new meanings are either added or old meanings are ousted by new meanings. The number of sound combinations that human speech organs can produce is limited. Therefore at a certain stage of language development the production of new words by morphological means becomes limited. Thus, polysemy becomes an important means of enriching the vocabulary. http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~paulb/CoreLex/corelex.html 2. Polysemy and polysemous: having many meanings Polysemy is, according to Webster’ Collegiate, the multiplicity of meanings. It is the opposite of monosemy. The word was coined by Michel Bréal, founder of historical semantics, preoccupied, as was his contemporary Antoine Darmesteter, with the evolution of meaning in words. Polysemy is reality, as witnessed by subsenses in dictionary entry. Cf. cause, rebellion, and rebel. The vast majority of words are polysemous and, generally speaking, only technical or scientific words are monosemic, at least immediately after being coined or derived. The most abstruse the science or field, the longer monosemy will prevail. Some linguists even suggested that polysemy was paradoxically sign of meaning depletion, due to frequent uses. Polysemy is especially exploited in poetry and puns. For example, walk as in The child started to walk and They live at 213 Meadow Walk. Such senses may be more or less distant from one another: walk (action), walk (street) are relatively close, but crane (bird), crane (machine) are much further apart. It is generally agreed that in each case only one word is being discussed, not two that happen to have the same form (to which the name homonym is given). Senses of the same word are seldom ambiguous in context, but the less specific the context, the greater the possibility of ambiguity; for example, if someone who is looking at a picture says What big cranes!, it may not be immediately clear to someone who can not see the picture whether the comment refers to birds or machines. There is an extensive grey area between the concepts of polysemy and homonymy. A word like walk is polysemous (went walking, went for a walk, walk the dog, Meadow Walk Drive), while a word like bank is homonymous between at least bank for money and bank of a river. When a word develops a new meaning, it sometimes loses the old one. For example, the word wan (Old English wann) at first meant "dark", or even "black", being applied to a raven and to night. In late Middle English, it developed its modern sense of "pale". This change of meaning seems to have taken place partly through the application of the word to human faces discolored by disease, and partly through its use to describe the color of lead. From meaning "darkened by disease" it came to mean "livid", "the color a person's face is when he/she is ill", and then "pale". When one word has two such contradictory meanings as "dark" and "pale", there are serious dangers of confusion; and it is not surprising that one of them died out; the meaning "dark" is last recorded in the sixteenth century. The coexistence of several meanings in one word, which is extremely common, as stated earlier, is called polysemy. Some words develop a whole family of meanings, each new meaning often forming yet another starting point for more; if in a good dictionary you look up such words as natural, good, loose, free, and real, you will be surprised at the number of meanings listed. Being able to distinguish between polysemy words and homonym words is not easy. 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. This often happens in political or moral disputes, where words like freedom and natural get thrown around in ill-defined and shifting senses. 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. Of course, reasoned demonstration is only one of the many functions of language; in some uses, polysemy plays an essential part, enabling us to achieve a complexity and a compression that would otherwise be impossible. The kind of impact Shakespeare produces in his major works would be impossible without the richness given to the language by polysemy because every word is clustered around with associations, derived from the different types of context in which it can be used. 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. Are table (furniture) and table. (arrangement of data) two different words, or the same word with two meanings? Dictionaries usually go for the latter solution, on the grounds of a shared etymology. On the other hand, pupil (in school) and pupil (of the eye) are usually listed as different words; although in fact they have the same historical origin. French volver "fly" and volver "steal' are similar: they are now thought of as different words, but both derive from the Latin volare. As you can see, there is often a conflict between historical criteria and present-day intuition when sorting out cases of polysemy and homonymy. 3. Treatment of homophony and polysemy in dictionaries The issue of how homophony and polysemy should be distinguished is particularly relevant for lexicographers. As a matter of principle, the different readings of homophonous words should be specified as different key words, whereas the readings of a polysemous word should be specified under one key word. For example, consider the following entry for bank in Webster’s new dictionary and thesaurus, 1989: (12) bank1 [bangk] n a mound or ridge; the margin of a river; rising ground in a lake or sea; the lateral, slanting turn of an aircraft. – vt to pile up; to cover (a fire) so as to lessen the rate of combustion; to mak (an aircraft) slant laterally on a turn; to make (a billiard ball) recoil from a cushion. [ME banke, of Scand. origin, cog. with bank (2 and 3), bench] bank2 [bangk] n a row of oars; a row or tier, as of keys in a keyboard. – vt to arrange in a row or tier [OFr banc, of Gmc. origin, cog. with bank (1)] bank3 [banngk] n a place where money or other valuable material, e.g. blood, data (blood, data bank) is deposited until required; an institution for the keeping, lending and exchanging, etc. of money; vi to deposit in a bank. – ns bank account (…) The different entries are different words that happen to have the same phonology (even though they are all etymologically related in this case). The descriptions within each entry refer to different uses of polysemous words. It is debatable whether the choice of key words is always right; for example, the use of bank in aviation might warrant a separate entry. A dictionary obviously should list homophonous entries separately. But it is not so clear how detailed the listing of the readings of a polysemous word should be, given the fact that in many cases these readings will be related to each other by general laws. In the case of hand, the intransitive use and the transitive use of bank in aviation are clearly related by general laws, the ‘place’ interpretation and the ‘institution’ interpretation of bank3 are systematically related, etc. The dictionary forgets to mention that the institutional intepretation does not only hold for banks that save money, but could equally well be applicable, e.g., for a blood bank. Should we identify the following variations in the meanings of "up" as polysemy or homonymy? There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other English two-letter word, and it is "up". It's easy to understand up, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake up? At a meeting, why does a topic come up? Why do we speak up and why are the officers up for election and why is it up to the secretary to write up a report? We call up our friends and we use it to brighten up a room, polish up the silver, and we warm up the leftovers and clean up the kitchen. We lock up the house and some guys fix up the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line up for tickets, work up an appetite, and think up excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed up is extra special. Another use of up is confusing as a drain must be opened up because it is stopped up. We open up a store in the morning but we close it up at night. Do you have the impression that we seem to be pretty mixed up about up? To be knowledgeable of the proper uses of up, look up the word in the dictionary. In a desk size dictionary, the word up, takes up almost 1/4th the page and definitions add up to about thirty. If you are up to it, you might try building up a list of the many ways up is used. It will take up a lot of your time, but if you don't give up, you may wind up with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding up . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing up. When it rains, it wets up the earth. When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry up. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it up, for now my time is up, so . . . I'll shut up. 4. Diachronic approach to polysemy If polysemy is viewed diachronically, it is understood as the growth and development or, in general, a change in the semantic structure of the word. This problem may be approached from two different angles. If polysemy is viewed diachronically, it is understood as the growth and development or, in general a change in the semantic structure of the word. Polysemy in diachronic terms implies that a word may retain its previous meaning or meanings and at the same time acquire one or several new ones. Then the problem of interrelation and interdependence of individual meanings of a polysemantic word may be roughly formulated as follows: did the word always posses all its meanings or did some of them appear earlier than the others? Are the new meanings dependent on the meanings already existing? And if so what is the nature of this dependence? Can we observe any changes in the arrangement of the meanings? And so on. In the course of a diachronic semantic analysis of the polysemantic word table we find that of all the meanings it has in modern English, the primary meaning is “a flat slab of stone or wood” which was proper to the word in the old English period (OE, tabule from L. tabula); (2 meaning: the persons seated at a table (to keep the table amused); 3. the food put on a table, meals (to keep a good, poor table); 4. a thin flat piece of stone, metal, wood; 5. slabs of stone; 6. words cut into them or written on them (the ten tables); 7 an orderly arrangement of facts, figures (table of contents); 8. part of machine-tool on which the work is put to be operated on; 9. a level area, a plateau.) All other meanings are secondary as they are derived from the primary meaning of the word and appeared later than the primary meaning. It follows that the main source of polysemy is a change in the semantic structure of the word. Polysemy may also arise from homonymy. When two words become identical in sound- form, the meanings of the two words are felt as making up one semantic structure. Thus, the human ear and the ear of corn are from the diachronic point of view two homonyms. One is etymologically related to latin auris, the other to latin acus, aceris. Synchronically, however they are perceived as two meanings of on and the same word. The ear of corn is felt to be a metaphor of the usual type (cf. the eye of the needle, the foot of the mountain) and consequently as one of the derived or synchronically, minor meanings of the polysemantic word ear. Cases of this type are comparatively rare and, as a rule, illustrative of the vagueness of the border line between polysemy and homonymy. Semantic changes result as a rule in new meanings being added to the ones already existing in the semantic structure of the word. Some of the old meanings may become obsolete or even disappear, but the bulk of English words tend to increase in number of meanings. (Based on R.S. Ginsburg’s book “Modern English Lexicology”) 5. Synchronic approach to polysemy Synchronically we understand polysemy as the coexistence of various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period of the development of the English language. In that case the problem of interrelation and interdependence of individual meanings making up the semantic structure of the word must be investigated along different lines. In connection with the polysemantic word table discussed above we are mainly concerned with the following problems: are all the nine meanings equally representative of the semantic structure of this word? Is the order in which the meanings are enumerated (or registered) in dictionaries purely arbitrary or does it reflect the comparative value of individual meanings, the place they occupy in the semantic structure of the word table? Intuitively we feel that the meaning that is actually representative of the word, the meaning that first occurs to us whenever we hear or see the word table, is “an article of furniture”. This emerges as the basic or the central meaning of the word and all other meanings are minor in comparison. We can assume that the meaning “a piece of furniture” occupies the central place in the semantic structure of the word table. As to other meanings of this word we find it hard to grade them in order of their comparative value. Some may, for example, consider the second and the third meanings. As equally “important”, some may argue that the meaning “food put on the table” should be given priority. As synchronically there is no objective criterion to go by, we may find it difficult in some cases to single out even the basic meanings as two or more meanings of the word may be felt as equally “central” in it’s semantic structure. If we analyze the verb to get, which of the two meanings “to obtain” (get a letter) or “to arrive” (get to London) shall be regard as the basic meaning of this word? A more objective criterion of the comparative value of individual meanings seems to be the frequency of their occurrence in speech. There is a tendency in modern linguistic to interpret the concept of the central meaning in terms of the frequency of occurrence of this meaning. In a study of five million words made by a group of linguistic scientists it was found that the frequency value of individual meanings is different. As far as the word table is concerned the meaning “a piece of furniture” possesses the highest frequency value and makes up 52% of all the uses of this word, the meaning “an orderly arrangement of facts (table of contents) accounts for 35%, all other meanings between them make up just 13% of the uses of this word. It should be also noted that the meaning of the highest frequency value is the one representative of the whole semantic structure of the word. This could be illustrated by analyzing words worker (a man who does manual work) and hand (the end of the arm beyond the wrist- this meaning occurs for at least 77% of all occurrences of this word) (Based on R.S. Ginsburg’s book “Modern English Lexicology”) From the discussion of the diachronic and synchronic approach to polysemy it follows that the interrelation and the interdependence of individual meanings of the word may be described from two different angles. The semantic structure is never static, the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic evaluation of individual meanings may be different in different periods of the historical development of language. (Based on R.S. Ginsburg’s book “Modern English Lexicology”) 6. Frequent types of polysemy Several types of polysemous variation occur so frequently that they should be considered part of the grammatical knowledge of the speakers of a language. The following list extends on the list given in Pustejovsky (1995): First, we have count/mass alternations for nouns, which can serve several functions: Animal/meat: a. The lamb is running in the field. b. John ate lamb for breakfast. Object/Stuff an object is made up: a. There is an apple on the table. b. There is apple in the salad. Stuff/Kind: a. There was cheese on the table. b. Three cheeses were served. Stuff/Portions: a. The restaurant served beer, and so b. we ordered three beers. Plant/food alternation: a. Mary watered the fig in the garden. b. Mary ate the fig. We have alternations between containers and contained: a. Mary broke the bottle. b. The baby finished the bottle. Figure/Ground reversal: a. The window is rotting. b. Mary crawled through the window. Product/producer alternation, e.g. newspaper, Honda: a. The newspaper fired its editor. b. John spilled coffee on the newspaper. Process/result alternation: a. The company’s merger with Honda will begin next fall. b. The merger will lead to the production of more cars. Place/people: a. John traveled to New York. b. New York kicked the mayer out of office. Capital/government, e.g. Washington accused Havana not to do enough for the victims. Manfred Krifka: Lexikalische Semantik, SS 2001,, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Di 14-16, MOS 403, 05.06.2001, S. 4 7. Examples of the polysemantic words LINE (noun) 1. a long mark of very slight breadth, made with a pen, pencil, tool, etc., on a surface. 2. a continuous extent of length, straight or curved, without breadth or thickness; the trace of a moving point. 3. something arranged along a line, esp. a straight line; a row: a line of trees. 4. a number of persons standing one behind the other and waiting their turns at or for something; queue. 5. something resembling a traced line, as a seam or furrow: lines of stratification in rock. 6. a furrow or wrinkle on the face, neck, etc. 7. an indication of demarcation; boundary; limit: the county line; a fine line between right and wrong. 8. a row of written or printed letters, words, etc. 9. a unit in the metrical structure of a poem or lyric, composed of feet. 10. Usu.,

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