Vagueness's puzzles, polysemy's vagaries

The Representation of Polysemous Words

“…Some linguistic analyses of polysemy have proposed that there is no firm line to be drawn between polysemy and more usual ambiguity (see Geeraerts, 1993, andTuggy, 1993, for one such discussion). Furthermore, some linguists have argued against the more basic assumption of separable senses.…”

“…Indeed, in some cases, the same word can be used in two senses at once, as in Your book is not only badly written, it is too heavy; or The factory fired its workers and then was burned to the ground (Fauconnier, 1985;Cruse, 1986;Geeraerts, 1993). Thus, it is not clear that inhibition would be as desirable as it is for homonymy-or even possible.…”

“…Unfortunately, psychologists have not been very good at keeping these two terms separate. In particular, the term polysemy, which is used in linguistics to refer to a word having related senses (e.g., Cruse, 1986;Geeraerts, 1993), is often used as a synonym for ambiguity (including homonymy) in the psychological literature. For example, Hino and Lupker (1996) titled their article "Effects of Polysemy .…”

Imperative as conditional: From constructional to compositional semantics

“…However, apart from the general problems with monosemous approaches that have been widely discussed elsewhere in the literature (e.g. by Kirsner 1991 andGeeraerts 1993), the type of analysis presented in Figure 1 is problematic specifically for the purpose of our investigation.…”

Portuguese WordNet: general architecture and internal semantic relations

“…Distinct senses of a word form induce independent truth conditions: (2000)), we do not assume a polysemy/monosemy dichotomy. We rather presuppose a gradient of discreteness (for a different position see Geeraerts (1993), among others). 6 These indicators are usually called "ambiguity tests".…”