The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes

Abstract

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6–12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses.

Metaphor Is Between Metonymy and Homonymy: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

“…They argue that these results are in line with the cognitive linguistics approach, according to which metonymy is based on a single cognitive domain, whereas metaphor reflects mapping between two distinct cognitive domains ( Lakoff and Johnson, 1980 ; Lakoff and Turner, 2009 ). The dissociation between metonymies and metaphors was also observed in the semantic clustering study by Lopukhina et al (2018) : in a clustering experiment, participants were presented with short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses (e.g., perelom pozvonka “vertebral fracture,” perelom cheshetsa “the fracture itches,” istoricheskij perelom “historical crisis”) and were asked to sort them into virtual baskets, so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. Participants often confused literal senses with metonymic senses of the words, but not any other pairs of senses.…”

Meaning Relatedness in Polysemous and Homonymous Words: An Erp Study in Russian

“…At the same time there is experimental evidence that homonymous and polysemous words are processed differently: homonyms had longer response latencies in lexical decision tasks (Klepousniotou, 2002;Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007) and they required longer fixation times in the reading task (Frazier & Rayner, 1990). Within polysemous words, metonymies and metaphors are also processed differently: metonymies were recognized faster than metaphors in lexical decision tasks (Klepousniotou, 2002;Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007) as well as in the sensicality judgement priming task (Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008); literal senses were confused with metonymic senses more often than with metaphorical senses in the semantic clustering task (Lopukhina, Laurinavichyute, Lopukhin, & Dragoy, 2018). All this evidence leads to the conclusion that the degree of semantic closeness is related to the pattern of meaning storage in the mental lexicon: literal and metonymic senses of a polysemous word are stored in the same mental representations while literal and metaphoricalin separate representations (Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007;Klepousniotou et al, 2008).…”

RAW-C: Relatedness of Ambiguous Words in Context (A New Lexical Resource for English)

“…First, the broad category of "polysemy" is often subdivided into different mechanisms or manners of conceptual relation, such as metaphor and metonymy. This distinction is also believed to be cognitively relevant, with some evidence that metaphorically related senses are represented differently than metonymically related ones (Klepousniotou, 2002;Klepousniotou and Baum, 2007;Lopukhina et al, 2018;Yurchenko et al, 2020). Future work could annotate polysemous word pairs for whether they are related by metaphor, metonymy, or another class of semantic relation-annotations could even be made as granular as the specific semantic relation involved (e.g., Animal for Meat) (Srinivasan and Rabagliati, 2015).…”