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

6. Polysemy in Context and Communication
Beyond the complex question of what lexical items encode, the ubiquity of polysemy in natural languages raises two further questions, which have implications for accounts of language processing, comprehension and production. The first question is how lexical meanings get extended into different senses. If we grant that some, and possibly many senses of polysemous lexical items are derived or constructed during on-line processing, what are the processes or mechanisms involved, and how do they operate? The second is the fundamental question of why polysemy exists at all. What is it about our language systems—specifically their lexical component—that makes them so susceptible to polysemy? Why do language users rather use the same word to refer to different things or properties than have a distinct word for each sense?
Accounts of how polysemy arises in linguistic and extralinguistic context can broadly be divided into two main camps: rule- or coercion-based approaches and pragmatic inferential approaches. In formal and computational semantics it has been common to analyze regular polysemy as being generated by an inventory of lexical rules (Asher & Lascarides, 2003; Copestake & Briscoe, 1995; Gillon, 1992; Ostler & Atkins, 1992). For instance, Copestake and Briscoe (1995) suggest that the rule of universal grinding (Pelletier, 1975) and a set of conventionalized subcases of it (meat-grinding, fur-grinding, etc.) can account for regular polysemy of the kind in (7):
7a. There was rabbit all over the highway. ( universal grinding)
7b. Agustin and Ingrid had rabbit for dinner. (meat grinding)
7c. The model wore rabbit on the catwalk. (fur grinding)
Proponents of this sort of approach claim that lexical rules are necessary to explain the productivity of regular polysemy and the availability of default interpretations in uninformative contexts (see Frisson & Frazier, 2005, for a psycholinguistic study testing this account).
Asher (2011) takes a somewhat different approach to regular polysemy in his coercion-based approach. He suggests that instances of regular polysemy—those that pass the co-predication and anaphoric binding tests (e.g., “The rabbit was cute and (it was also) delicious”)—require the postulation of dot objects, where the related senses are represented together as part of a complex representation. Other types of polysemy—those that do not pass the co-predication and anaphoric binding tests (e.g., ?? “The ham sandwich is delicious and (it is) impatient”)—are taken to be generated by the process of coercion, which takes as its input a literal meaning and, forced by a type mismatch in the composition process, delivers a different sense as output. On rule- and coercion-based approaches, polysemy could be motivated by a goal of economy of expression, representing an effort-saving strategy for the speaker and contributing to linguistic-communicative efficiency. The speaker can rely on the addressee to apply the requisite linguistic mechanism(s) to generate the contextually appropriate sense. Although rule- and coercion-based approaches do not explicitly adhere to this position, it provides them with a plausible explanation for why polysemy is such a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages (see Falkum, 2015, for discussion).
A radically different approach to polysemy generation can be found in the field of lexical pragmatics, which specifically studies the interaction between an expression’s standing meaning and aspects of the context, where context is not limited, as in rule- and coercion-based approaches, to material provided by linguistic structure (Nunberg, 1995; Blutner, 1998; Bosch, 2007; Carston, 2002; Recanati, 2004; Wilson & Carston, 2007). A central claim of lexical pragmatics is that word meanings typically undergo pragmatic modulation (in the form of conceptual specification, broadening, metaphorical or metonymic extension) in the course of utterance interpretation, and this is what gives rise to polysemy. The ubiquity of polysemy in natural languages suggests that speakers and hearers might find it easier to extend already existing words to related domains than to invent new words for each sense, and lexical pragmatic processes are thought to play a key role in enabling communicators to do this. Indeed, some “radical” pragmatic accounts tend to see polysemy as an epiphenomenon of pragmatic processes applying at the level of individual words: “In general … polysemy is the outcome of a pragmatic process whereby intended senses are inferred on the basis of encoded concepts and contextual information” (Sperber & Wilson, 1998, p. 197). The existence of polysemy has a strong motivation on this pragmatic account, where it arises to meet the communicative needs of speakers and hearers (Falkum, 2015). Such speaker–hearer interactions, which result in the formation of novel, polysemous senses are also thought to be the main driving force of lexical semantic change (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Hopper & Traugott, 1993/2003; Sweetser, 1990; Traugott & Dasher, 2002). Polysemy is seen as one stage along the path to semantic change, where related senses of a word—which may have emerged at historically different periods—coexist for a certain time in a language, both in individual speakers and in language communities (see Traugott, Semantic Change), before one takes over from the other in conventional usage. While it is widely agreed that processes such as metaphor and metonymy play an important role in lexical semantic change, the question of what consequences the source of a polysemy—and the semantic change that often follows—may have for lexical representation and sense activation/construction remains a largely unexplored question.