Polysemy, monosemy and homonymy
The different senses of pièce are not unrelated, as an examination of the word’s history shows. Pièce comes from Mediaeval Latin petia, and the meaning shown in (28a) is the oldest sense from which the others are derived (Rey 1998: pièce). The other four meanings developed subsequently through ordinary processes of semantic extension which we will discuss in Chapter 11. The semantic links between many of these senses can still be easily imagined: the meaning ‘coin’, for example, is derived from the collocation pièce de monnaie ‘piece of money’, while ‘play’ is derived from pièce de théâtre ‘piece of theatre’.
QUESTION Can you suggest how some of the other senses might be related? What problems are there in deciding?
The term polysemy is usually reserved for words like pièce which show a collection of semantically related senses. We can thus defi ne polysemy as the possession by a single phonological form of several conceptually related meanings. We will return to this definition in a moment. The opposite of polysemy is monosemy (Greek ‘single meaning’): a word is monosemous if it contains only a single meaning. Many technical terms are monosemous: orrery, for example, has no other recorded meaning in English than ‘clockwork model of the solar system’, and appendectomy (or appendicectomy) means only ‘excision of the appendix’. Monosemous words may often be general over a variety of distinct readings. The English noun cousin, for example, is general over the readings ‘son of father’s sister’, ‘daughter of mother’s brother’, ‘son of father’s brother’, etc., but is usually considered as having only the single meaning ‘offspring of parent’s sibling’.
Polysemy also contrasts with homonymy (Greek ‘same name’), the situation where a single phonological form possesses unrelated meanings. A good example of a homonym is provided by the English verb pronounced [WeIV], and spelt wave or waive, depending on the meaning. The different spellings of this word are a clue to the fact that we are dealing with two historically different verbs whose pronunciations happen to have con verged. Thus, wave derives from Old English wafian, whereas waive was borrowed into English, ultimately from Old French gaiver. These two words originally had different pronunciations, which intervening sound changes have removed. In a situation like this it would make no sense to talk of polysemy. We do not, in English, posit the existence of a single lexeme pronounced [WeIV], polysemous between the meanings ‘make a sign with the hand’ (they waved goodbye) and ‘forgo’ (they waived the fee). As well as the absence of any historical relation, the two meanings are unrelated: it is hard to imagine how they could plausibly be conceptually linked.
Not all homonyms are conveniently distinguished by spelling. The French verb louer ‘hire’, for example, is a homonym of louer ‘praise’, but these two meanings were originally expressed by historically unrelated verbs: ‘hire’ comes from Latin locare, ‘praise’ from Latin laudare. A second example is also a French word starting with l, livre, which means both ‘pound’ and ‘book’. Again, these meanings are originally completely unconnected, ‘pound’ being derived from Latin libra, ‘book’ from Latin liber.
