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

5. Polysemy and Word Meaning
The debate regarding polysemy representation is intrinsically connected to the more general question of what word meanings are, and, specifically, what kind of mental representation a lexical form encodes. As already mentioned, theories of polysemy representation can broadly be divided into two camps: sense enumeration lexicons (SELs), where the different senses are taken to be represented separately, and one-representation approaches, where polysemous lexical items are seen as being represented either as core meanings from which their different senses are derived, or as overspecified meanings whose component parts are selected in context. Both these options are compatible with a number of different approaches to word meaning.
Sense Enumeration Lexicon.s
As mentioned in Section 2, an influential linguistic embodiment of the classical idea that word meanings can be spelled out in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (i.e., definitions) is Katz’s semantic theory (Katz, 1972; Katz & Fodor, 1963). Katz aimed to provide a theory of natural language semantics that was able to explain semantic relations and contrasts between word meanings (synonymy, antonymy, contradiction, analyticity, entailment, etc.), as well as the relation between word meanings and sentence meanings. On Katz’s account, the semantic component of the grammar contains a dictionary, which lists under a single lexical entry the different senses of a word (which together constitute the meaning of that word), each of which can be broken down into a set of semantic markers (or primitives).
Katz’s theory is a prime example of a sense enumeration lexicon, where different readings (both polysemous and homonymous) of a lexical item are listed under a single dictionary entry. Katz suggested that the distinction between polysemy and homonymy could be drawn on the basis of the notion of “semantic similarity.” According to his definition (Katz, 1972, p. 48), the senses of two constituents are similar if they have a semantic marker in common. However, unlike other cases of semantic relations, such as synonymy, antonymy, analyticity, and entailment, which can be “read off” elegantly from the theory by means of sameness, overlap, or incompatibility of semantic markers contained in the semantic representations of words, it appears that polysemy (and ultimately the distinction between polysemy and homonymy) is not so easily accounted for this way. It is likely, for instance, that there would be polysemous senses that do not share any semantic markers, especially when the senses are related by metonymic relations, such as newspaper as a physical object and newspaper as an institution (or the already mentioned case of liberal paper and shredded paper). In addition to any specific problems concerning polysemy and homonymy representation, philosophers at least since Wittgenstein (1953) have pointed out a number of more general problems for definitional theories, which, taken together, have made it nearly impossible to maintain as an account of lexical semantic representation (see Laurence & Margolis, 1999, for a comprehensive review of problems associated with the classical theory of concepts).
Another influential sense enumeration approach to word meaning and polysemy, which rejects the classical theory and builds on the assumption that categories exhibit prototypicality effects (Rosch, 1999 [1978]), is Lakoff’s (1987) theory of knowledge representation. In Lakoff’s framework, idealized cognitive models (ICMs) are relatively stable mental structures that represent theories about the world with respect to a particular domain, and which guide categorization and reasoning. On this approach, a single concept can be represented in terms of a combination of a number of individual ICMs in a “cluster concept.” Cluster concepts ground sense-extensions and give thus rise to radial categories (formed by the cluster concepts and the noncentral extensions or variants) This notion of radial categories forms the basis for Lakoff’s account of polysemy (Brugman, 1988; Brugman & Lakoff, 1988; Lakoff, 1987), which has inspired a host of studies of polysemy within the strand of linguistics known as cognitive semantics. On this approach, which takes linguistic categories to be no different from other kinds of conceptual categories, most word meanings are seen as a type of radial category in which the different senses of a word are organized with respect to a prototypical sense. The paradigmatic example is the preposition over, first discussed by Brugman (1988):
5a. The bird flew over the house. (‘ above and across’)