Taylor 6

1
Taylor 6

• Polysemy Meaning Chains

2
Overview

• Many linguistic categories are associated with
  several prototypes.
• This chapter will talk about family resemblance
  and problems with that model.

3
6.1 Monosemous Polysemous Categories

• Polysemy -- the association of two or more
  related senses with a single linguistic form,
  e.g. school
• Note that the related senses are often operative
  in different domains
• Sometimes it is hard to tell whether you have
  monosemy or polysemy -- ambiguity is a key test

4
3 Tests for Ambiguity

• Test 1 Does an expression have more than one
  reading? Ambiguity is indicative of polysemy, but
  vagueness is not.
• Ambiguity I dont want a pig in the house --
  this can refer to either an animal or a slob, but
  it has to refer to one or the other
• Vagueness Theres a bird in the garden -- this
  can refer to a variety of different birds, we
  dont need to know which one

5
3 Tests for Ambiguity

• Test 2 Can the different senses be coordinated
  in a single construction?
• Arthur and his drivers license expired last
  Thursday.
• My kids drive me crazy and I drive them
  everywhere else.

6
3 Tests for Ambiguity

• Test 3 do so too requires selection of only one
  meaning
• I dont want a pig in the house and neither does
  Jane -- this requires that both I and Jane be
  referring to the same sense of pig

7
3 Tests for Ambiguity

• These tests are not perfect.
• the boundary between monosemy and polysemy is
  fuzzy
• LAJ -- These tests are also focused almost
  exclusively on polysemy of lexical items. It is
  my experience that polysemy exists throughout
  grammar, but these tests would not apply smoothly

8
Polysemy vs. Homonymy

• The different meanings of a polysemous lexical
  item are felt to be related in some non-trivial
  way.
• Homonymy is when unrelated meanings attach to
  the same phonological form.
• But again, the boundary between the two is fuzzy.
• Previous approaches have tended to describe all
  phenomena in terms of homonymy, denying the
  existence of polysemy.

9
6.2 Climb 6.3 Over

• The point of these case studies is that there are
  polysemous categories that do NOT have a single
  core meaning shared bu all members. There is no
  meaning of climb (such as laborious use of limbs,
  upward motion) that is shared by all uses.
  Instead, there is a chaining of meanings creating
  a network. The same goes for over the meaning of
  prepositions seems chaotic and shows great
  variation from language to language.

10
6.4 Some Problems

• If some members are more central than others,
  what gives them this central status?
• Perhaps the central member shares a maximum
  number of attributes with other members? -- but
  this doesnt work for large and complex
  categories like over.

11
6.4 Some Problems, contd.

• Another possibility
• the central member is that member from which
  all others can be most plausibly and most
  economically related

12
6.4 Some Problems, contd.

• Another problem
• are there constraints on the polysemization
  process? Are there impossible categories? Can
  anything get associated with anything else in a
  category?
• if it is not possible to state absolute
  constraints on the content of family resemblance
  categories, it might nonetheless be the case that
  certain kinds of meaning extension are more
  frequent, more typical, and more natural than
  others. We should be looking for these patterns.

13
6.4 Some Problems, contd.

• Final problem
• What is the process by which different things get
  associated in the first place? This question will
  be addressed in Chapter 7.