Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap.

Abstract

Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged whether ambiguous words embedded in word pairs (e.g., tasty chicken) made sense as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. The ambiguous words were independently rated as having low, moderate, or highly overlapping senses to approximate a continuum from homonymy to metonymic polysemy. The effects of meaning dominance were examined. Words with highly overlapping meanings (e.g., metonymy) showed reduced effects of context and dominance compared with words with moderately or low overlapping meanings (e.g., metaphorical polysemy and homonymy). These results suggest that the comprehension of ambiguous words is mediated by the semantic overlap of alternative senses/meanings.

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…The different senses of, e.g., 'school', do not look like specifications of a more general, abstract, meaning in this same way (it could be held that school-the-building specifies the meaning of 'school', but it is difficult to say that what it specifies is a general, abstract, meaning). That is, whereas the regular polysemy that we find in some nouns cannot be accounted for in terms of common cores (Klepousniotou et al, 2008), or properly underspecific (vs. overspecific) representations (Frisson, 2009), the different senses of verbs do seem to share some features, and so to have a common core. I have argued elsewhere (Vicente, 2017) that this is due to the fact that the polysemy that verbs typically display is metaphor-based, whereas the regular polysemy patterns that nouns such as 'school' display is metonymy-based.…”

“…These are all productive and regular patterns, and most of them can be found in many languages of the world (Srinivasan and Rabagliati, 2015). One typical way of dealing with these cases is by postulating different representations stored either in two separate lexical entries or within a single lexical entry (sense-enumeration lexicons) (Foraker and Murphy, 2012); another is to postulate a core common meaning (Klepousniotou, et al, 2008, Frisson, 2009; and yet another is to posit richer conceptual representations (Pustejovsky, 1995).…”

“…And in Bierwisch and Schreuder's (1992) two-level semantics, the semantics of a word provides necessary conditions on its conceptual meaning, which is typically richer than its properly semantic meaning. Thorough the paper, I will take it that a thin meanings theory holds (a) that lexical meanings constrain the uses of a word, and (b) that they do it by encoding certain schematic meaning which applies to all, or at least most, of the correct uses of the word (for other proposals along these lines, and from different fields, see Ruhl, 1989, Klepousniotou et al, 2008, Frisson, 2009.…”

“…So they are all active when we think about schools in any of its different senses: this is the main reason why a speaker would use the word school to refer to any of these parts and why the hearer will easily understand her. (For empirical results, see Frisson, 2009, Klepousniotou et al 2008.…”

eDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

“…The difference between balanced and unbalanced ambiguous words is most pronounced in the case of homonyms-words for which a single written and spoken form is associated with multiple unrelated interpretations, and for which there is general agreement that the semantic overlap between the interpretations is minimal (e.g., <dog>/<tree> BARK; Armstrong & Plaut, 2008;Frazier & Rayner, 1990;Hino, Kusunose, & Lupker, 2010;Hino et al, 2006;Klein & Murphy, 2001Klepousniotou et al, 2008;Rodd et al, 2002;Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004;Rubenstein et al, 1970). This contrasts with polysemes, for which a single written and spoken form is associated with multiple related interpretations, which may reduce the degree to which each individual meaning may be differentially activated (Armstrong & Plaut, 2008Beretta, Fiorentino, & Poeppel, 2005;Frazier & Rayner, 1990;Klepousniotou et al, 2008;Pylkkänen, Llinás, & Murphy, 2006;Rodd et al, 2002; but see Hino et al, 2010;Hino et al, 2006;Klein & Murphy, 2001.…”