Polysemy and Ambiguity

Polysemy is the phenomenon of a single word carrying multiple related senses, raising questions about how senses are individuated, stored, and generated.

Definition

Polysemy is the association of a single lexical form with two or more distinct but related senses; ambiguity is the property of an expression of having more than one interpretation.

Scope

This topic covers the distinction between polysemy (related senses of one word), homonymy (unrelated words sharing a form), and vagueness (a single underspecified meaning). It treats the diagnostic tests used to tell these apart, regular or systematic polysemy (such as the count/mass or container/contents alternations), and theories that generate senses on the fly, notably Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. It also addresses syntactic and structural ambiguity insofar as they interact with lexical meaning.

Core questions

• How can polysemy be distinguished from homonymy and from mere vagueness?
• Are the multiple senses of a polysemous word listed in the lexicon or generated by rule?
• What regularities (systematic polysemy) recur across many words?
• How do speakers and parsers resolve ambiguity in context?

Key concepts

• polysemy vs. homonymy
• vagueness and generality
• systematic / regular polysemy
• zeugma test
• qualia structure
• coercion and sense extension

Key theories

Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky)

Many polysemous readings are not stored separately but generated compositionally from rich lexical structures (such as qualia roles) interacting with context, capturing regular sense alternations.

Sense-individuation tests

Cruse develops diagnostics (e.g. the zeugma or crossed-reading test) to determine whether a word is genuinely ambiguous between discrete senses or merely general/vague.

History

Traditional dictionaries listed senses without a principled theory of how they relate. From the 1980s, regular patterns of polysemy (e.g. 'chicken' as animal and as meat) attracted systematic study, and Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon (1995) offered a way to derive many readings compositionally rather than by exhaustive listing, influencing both theoretical and computational lexical semantics.

Debates

Sense enumeration vs. generative accounts

Whether each sense of a polysemous word is stored as a separate lexical entry, or whether senses are generated on demand from an underspecified entry and contextual mechanisms.

Key figures

• D. Alan Cruse
• James Pustejovsky
• George Lakoff

Seminal works

• cruse1986
• pustejovsky1995

Frequently asked questions

How do linguists tell polysemy from homonymy?

They consider whether the senses are felt to be semantically related and historically connected: 'mouth' (of a person, of a river) is polysemous because the senses are related, whereas 'bank' (finance) and 'bank' (riverside) are homonyms because they are historically distinct words.