Polysemy as a conceptual phenomenon
We begin by comparing and contrasting polysemy with homonymy. While both polysemy and homonymy give rise to lexical ambiguity (two or more meanings associated with a word), the nature of the ambiguity is different in each case. Polysemy is the phenomenon whereby a lexical item is commonly associated with two or more meanings that appear to be related in some way. Consider the following examples containing the English preposition over.
Each of these instances of over is associated with a slightly different meaning or sense (listed on the right), but these senses are nevertheless relatively closely related. This shows that over exhibits polysemy.
Polysemy contrasts with homonymy, which relates to two distinct words that happen to share the same form in sound (homophones) and/or in writing (homographs). For example, the form bank relates to two different words with unrelated meanings, ‘financial institution’ and ‘bank of a river’. These two senses are not only synchronically unrelated (unrelated in current usage) but also historically unrelated. The word bank meaning ‘side of river’ has been in the English language for much longer, and is related to the Old Icelandic word for ‘hill’, while the word bank meaning ‘financial institution’ was borrowed from Italian banca, meaning ‘money changer’s table’ (Collins English Dictionary).
While formal linguists have long recognised the existence of polysemy, it has generally been viewed as a surface phenomenon, in the sense that lexical entriesare underspecified (abstract and lacking in detail) and are ‘filled in’ either by context (Ruhl 1989) or by the application of certain kinds of lexical generative devices (Pustejovsky 1995). According to this view, polysemy is epiphenomenal, emerging from monosemy: a single relatively abstract meaning from which other senses (like the range of meanings associated with over) are derived on the basis of context, speaker intention, recognition of that intention by the hearer, and so on. A monosemy account is plausible in principle when accounting for senses like those in example (1), which are all spatial in nature and could therefore be accounted for in terms of a single abstract spatial sense. However, over also exhibits non-spatial senses. Consider example (2).
While the meaning of over in (2) might be characterised as a ‘control’ sense, it is difficult to see how a single abstract meaning could derive the three spatial senses in (1) as well as this non-spatial ‘control’ sense. After all, the sentence in (2) does not describe a spatial scene (Jane is not located above him in space), but has an abstract sense relating to a power relationship between two people.
One way of analysing the meaning of over in (2) would be to treat it as a dis tinct sense of over from the spatial senses in (1). This would amount to the claim that over in (2) is a homonym: a distinct word. A second possible analysis, which preserves the monosemy position, might claim that a single abstract underlying sense licenses both the spatial and non-spatial senses, but that while the spatial senses are literal, the non-spatial sense is metaphorical and is interpreted by applying pragmatic principles to retrieve the speaker’s intended meaning. As we develop the cognitive semantic position on polysemy, we will see why these lines of analysis are both rejected in favour of a radial category model of polysemy.
In their work on cognitive lexical semantics Claudia Brugman (1981; Brugman and Lakoff1988) and George Lakoff(1987) claimed that over is stored as a category of distinct polysemous senses rather than a single abstract monosemous sense. It follows from this position that polysemy reflects conceptual organisation and exists at the level of mental representation rather than being a purely surface phenomenon. In this respect, cognitive lexical semantics approaches diverged both from traditional and from more recent formal approaches to word meaning, in particular in developing the position that polysemy is a fundamentally conceptual phenomenon and that lexical organisation at the mental level determines polysemy as it is manifested in language use. Thus, in the same way that units of language are conceived as being stored in an inventory-like grammar (as we will see in Part III), the meanings associated with each linguistic unit are conceived as being stored as distinct, yet related, semantic entities, which we have referred to in previous chapters as lexical concepts. In addition, the cognitive approach, which posits highly detailed and fine-grained lexical structure, is at odds with the monosemy position, which posits highly abstract word meanings. Indeed, the monosemy view is widely held in formal lexical semantics and is adopted in order to ensure that lexical representation exhibits economy, an important concern for formal lexical semanticists.
The position originally proposed by Claudia Brugman was that polysemy as a conceptual phenomenon should form the basis of a theory of word meaning. This idea was developed within the theory of ICMs and radial categories developed by Lakoff, and integrated with the theory of conceptual metaphor developed by Lakoffand Johnson. Having explored these approaches in the previous two chapters, we are now in a position to approach word meaning from the perspective of cognitive semantics.
