Theme: polysemy subject: Lexicology Compiled by: Tursunboyev Sardor, group -60 Supervisor: F. f f. d. (PhD) Gavharoy Isroiljon kizi Andizhan 2023 Theme: Polysemy

3. Defining and Delimiting the Polysemy Phenomenon
The definition and delimitation of the polysemy phenomenon remains a source of theoretical discussion across disciplines: How do we tell polysemy apart from monosemy on the one hand, and from homonymy on the other? At first glance, the contrast with monosemy is clearer: While a monosemous term has only a single meaning, a polysemous term is associated with several related senses. This intuitive contrast is, however, not theory-neutral. Scholars who argue that polysemous senses derive from an abstract, core meaning (Ruhl, 1989), or that they remit to an atomic concept (Fodor, 1998; Fodor & Lepore, 2002), and explain the variations associated with word-tokens by appealing to pragmatics or world knowledge, would hold that polysemy is a spurious phenomenon, and that there is no actual monosemy/polysemy distinction. The distinction has to be drawn elsewhere, either in metaphysics (Fodor & Lepore, 2002) or in the conceptual realm.
Several linguistic tests have been devised to distinguish polysemy from monosemy. Particularly well known is Zwicky and Sadock’s (1975) identity test by conjunction reduction, where the conjunction of two different senses or meanings of a word in a single construction has an awkward effect (this is usually glossed as “giving rise to zeugma”). For instance, the verb expire has (at least) the two senses ‘cease to be valid’ and ‘die’, and so the sentence ‘?Arthur and his driving license expired yesterday’ is zeugmatic. Another type of test exploits the impossibility of anaphorically referring to different senses (Cruse, 2004), as in the sentence ‘?John read a line from his new poem. It was straight’, the pronoun cannot simultaneously refer to a sense of line combinable with the modifier straight (e.g., ‘long, narrow mark or band’) and the sense of line in the previous sentence (‘row of written/printed words’).
However, such tests for identity of meaning do not give clear-cut answers (for a review, see Geeraerts, 1993). In particular, only a slight manipulation of the context can yield a different result, as shown by the following example (Norrick, 1981, p. 115):
2a.Judy’s dissertation is thought provoking though yellowed with age.
2b.Judy’s dissertation is still thought provoking though yellowed with age.
Note also that these tests typically do not distinguish between polysemy and homonymy—that is, they do not distinguish between senses or meanings that are related and those that are unrelated—both of which come out as instances of a more general phenomenon of lexical ambiguity.
Linguistic tests have also been used to distinguish lexical ambiguity (including homonymy and “accidental” polysemy) from so-called “logical” polysemy on the assumption that the different senses of a logically polysemous expression can be felicitously conjoined and referred back to by use of an anaphoric pronoun (Asher, 2011). An example of successful conjunction is the sentence “Lunch was delicious but took forever,” where lunch refers consecutively to a type of food and to an event type. An example of a felicitous anaphora is found in the sentence “That book is boring. Put it on the top shelf,” where the pronoun it refers anaphorically to the physical object sense of the noun book, even though the sense of book activated in the previous sentence is the information sense. In contrast, lexically ambiguous terms give rise to zeugma when conjoined and do not allow for anaphoric reference. In this case, the linguistic tests distinguish between a particular kind of polysemy and lexical ambiguity but cannot distinguish the former from instances of monosemy. So it appears that some forms of polysemy have more in common with monosemy, and other forms are more similar to homonymy, and it is difficult to see what sort of linguistic test might help identify when a term is polysemous simpliciter.
Another criterion that has been suggested as a way to distinguish between polysemy and homonymy is speaker intuitions about sense relations. According to this “folk-etymological” criterion, two senses are polysemous if they are judged by native speakers to be related, and homonymous if they are judged to be unrelated. A problem with this criterion is that sense relatedness appears to be a matter of degree, and that judgments about the relatedness of the senses of a given word are likely to be subjective, so some speakers may claim to see a relation between the senses of a word form where others do not. Furthermore, it is not clear that such speaker intuitions have any bearing on the way in which individuals use and understand words (quite unlike grammaticality judgments, which are considered the basic data to be explained within generative syntax). This might be because intuitions about sense relations are largely metalinguistic, that is, arrived at by thinking about language, and not a direct reflex of the way in which word meanings are represented in the mental lexicon.