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

2. Historical Background
The fact that a word can be associated with multiple related senses was addressed at least as early as in the writings of Aristotle, although he did not use the label polysemy (Barnes, 1984). In Categories, Aristotle makes a distinction between synonymy (or univocity) and homonymy (or multivocity, ‘being spoken of in many ways’). Two things, a and b, are “synonymous” if they are both called by the same name F and they have identical definitions (Aristotle’s notion of synonymy is thus distinct from contemporary usage, where it refers to different words with the same meaning), while a and b are “homonymous” if they are called by the same name F, but the definition of F for a only partially overlaps with the definition of F for b (Shields, 2009). Thus, Aristotle’s notion of homonymy also covers cases that would be described as polysemy in contemporary linguistic terminology, such as the uses of healthy in (2):
2a.Socrates is healthy (‘ physicaly fit’).
2b.Socrates’ exercise regimen is healthy (‘promotes health’)
2c.Socrates’ complexion is healthy (‘ indicative of health’).
Aristotle observed that the meanings of healthy in (2) are not univocal, and that the uses in (2b) and (2c) are both dependent on the meaning of healthy in (2a) by being contained as part of their definitions. He referred to this as a kind of “core-dependent homonymy” (Shields, 1999), an intermediate case between “synonymy” (univocity) and full homonymy (this is sometimes also referred to as “focal meaning”; Owen, 1960).
Until relatively recently, almost all theories of linguistic semantics were based on the “classical” theory of meaning, adopted by Aristotle, according to which the meaning of a word can be stated in terms of necessary and sufficient application conditions (the major influence in the demise of this theory being Wittgenstein, 1953). This approach makes specific predictions regarding the representation of polysemy: A word will have as many meanings (or senses) as there are necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. Section 5.1 will look at an influential development of this general view (Katz, 1972; Katz & Postal, 1964). A modern version of the view is held by linguists working within the framework of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014; Wierzbicka, 1996). Polysemy, on this account, is posited only when the meaning of a word cannot be stated in the form of a single reductive paraphrase, but requires further specification in order to capture its full range of application (Goddard, 2000).
Another early appearance of the topic of lexical meaning variation in the history of Western philosophy is Locke (1975 [1689]) and Leibniz’s (1996 [1765]) disagreement regarding the meaning of the English connective but (cf. Fieke Van der Gucht & De Cuypere, 2007). For Locke, the many different senses associated with but (e.g., opposition, coordination, etc.) suggested that they could not all be instantiations of a single more abstract meaning, but had to be distinct. Against this multiplicity of meanings view, Leibniz (1996 [1765]: III, §4) argued that all uses of a word should be reduced to “a determinate number of significations” by searching for a paraphrase that is able to cover as much of the semantic variation as possible. This brief discussion between Locke and Leibniz sums up the broad lines of the traditional debate over polysemy: For a long time, theories of how polysemy is represented in the (mental) lexicon have been divided into two camps: sense enumeration and one-representation approaches (see Section 5). Sense enumeration approaches, which take polysemous lexical items to be represented in the form of lists of possible and/or attested senses, bear a clear resemblance to Locke’s position. One-representation approaches, which may treat polysemous lexical items as being represented in terms of highly abstract core meanings that remain constant across their different uses, have a strong affinity with Leibnitz’s position.
In general linguistics, Bréal ([1897] 1924) was the first to use the term polysemy (la polysémie) to describe single word forms with several related meanings. For Bréal, polysemy was primarily a diachronic phenomenon, arising as a consequence of lexical semantic change. When words acquire new meanings through use, their old meanings typically remain in the language. So polysemy involves the parallel existence of new and old meanings and is a result of new senses becoming conventionalized: It is the synchronic outcome of lexical semantic change. At the same time, Bréal ([1897]1924) observed that, at the synchronic level, polysemy is not really an issue, since the context of discourse determines the sense of a polysemous word and eliminates its other possible meanings.
Following the advent of transformational-generative grammar, with its main focus on syntax, and of truth-conditional theories in semantics, the topic of polysemy received little attention for several decades (notable exceptions are Anderson & Ortony, 1975; Apresjan, 1974; Caramazza & Grober, 1976; Weinreich, 1964, 1966). But with the emergence of cognitive linguistics during the 1980s, polysemy reappeared as a key topic on the research agenda, in particular as a result of Lakoff and Brugman’s pioneering studies of prepositional polysemy (Brugman, 1988; Brugman & Lakoff, 1988; Lakoff, 1987). The central claim of these cognitive linguists was that polysemy is not so much a linguistic phenomenon as a cognitive one, resulting from the way in which our conceptual categories are structured (see Section 5.1).
Outside cognitive linguistics, however, polysemy was a relatively neglected phenomenon in linguistic semantics and philosophy of language. Part of this neglect was due to the strong focus on sentential, truth-conditional meaning and the little attention devoted to the issue of word meaning, in particular the meaning of lexical content words. In philosophy of language, it has not been uncommon for authors to pursue their semantic theorizing without addressing the notion of word meaning at all (Davidson, 2001). In Montagovian semantics (Montague, 1970), where the main concern is how to obtain sentential meanings from individual denotations using functional application, scholars have focused on how different classes of words interact with each other in the composition of sentential meanings, and on the role that functional items play in the composition process. In this endeavor, semanticists have typically (either explicitly or tacitly) adopted one version or another of literalism, that is, the idea that, barring homonymy and indexicality, each word-type has a unique simple denotation, such as a certain individual or a certain (nonconjunctive or disjunctive) property.
Generally, within these approaches to semantics, variations in a word’s contribution to sentential meaning have been treated in one of four ways: (i) as simple cases of ambiguity (aka homonymy), (ii) as denotations of indexical expressions, (iii) as meanings resulting from the operation of coercion mechanisms (see Section 5), or (iv) as pragmatically derived meanings (see Section 5) (which may or may not affect truth conditions). In other words, polysemy is reduced to something that is assumed to be nonproblematic from the point of view of standard semantic compositionality (see Pelletier, Semantic Compositionality).
This does not mean, however, that polysemy necessarily jeopardizes compositional, truth-conditional semantics, even though scholars like Chomsky (2002) and Pietroski (2017) believe it does. But it seems clear that the variability in a word’s meaning does complicate the picture semanticists have been working with, at least if this variability is taken to be a property of the meaning of the word itself. There are examples of polysemy where this seems to be the case: The word book, for instance, can have an information sense (‘I have read a book’) or a physical object sense (‘Put the book on the top shelf’), which seems to be not in virtue of book being an indexical, or in virtue of some coercion or pragmatic mechanism, but, rather, because it has the meaning it has.
Contemporary research on polysemy can be divided into four broad camps. One is the well of polysemy studies conducted within the cognitive linguistic framework, inspired by Lakoff and Brugman’s early studies and Langacker’s (1987) foundational work in cognitive grammar (Cuyckens & Zawada, 1997; Dunbar, 2001; Evans, 2009; Geeraerts, 1993; Nerlich & Clarke, 2001; Taylor, 2003, 2006; Tuggy, 1993; Tyler & Evans, 2003, and many others). Another is the growing number of formal and computational accounts of polysemy, with Pustejovsky’s (1995) generative lexicon theory and Asher’s (2011) type composition logic as the most prominent representatives (see also Arapinis, 2013; Asher, 2015; Asher & Pustejovsky, 2006; Copestake & Briscoe, 1995; Pustejovsky, 1998; Spalek, 2015; Zarcone, 2014). Furthermore, recent work in pragmatics and philosophy of language focusing the nature of word meaning and its interaction with contextual information in the derivation of speaker meanings, has a direct bearing on the issue of polysemy (Blutner, 1998, 2002; Bosch, 2007; Carston, 2002, 2012, 2016; Recanati, 1995, 2004; Vicente, 2015; Wilson, 2011; Wilson & Carston, 2006, 2007). Finally, psycholinguists study how the mental lexicon represents polysemy compared with homonymy, a long-standing debate in the polysemy literature (Frazier & Rayner, 1990, Foraker & Murphy, 2012; Frisson, 2015; Klein & Murphy, 2001; Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007; Pylkkänen, Llinás, & Murphy, 2006), as well as the differences in processing different kinds of polysemy in composition (Schumacher, 2013).