Mary began the novel.
They see the verb “ to begin” as polysemantic, and the phenomenon – “verbal polysemy”. Furthermore, they include all the figures of speech (metaphors, metonyms etc.) to the field of polysemy.
I adhere to a more traditional view on the matter. Contemplating on different instances of word usage, I would first decide on whether it is a case of ambiguity or vagueness, i.e. whether the word has a different sense in each case, or are those examples of the same sense influenced by different contexts. If it is a case of ambiguity, another dichotomy comes to the fore – whether we deal with polysemy or homonymy. Homonymy is the case when two or more different lexemes have the same shape, in other words, different senses of the word are not related neither at the present stage of language development, nor historically. Polysemy refers to cases where senses are believed to be related. Within polysemy, there are two main ways of sense modification – broadening and specialising. Illustrating the first one, lets look at the word “cloud”, which as a noun originally means “concentrations of very small drops of water which can be seen floating in the sky”, such as in “The top of the mountain was covered in cloud”; in the transferred sense the word can be used to denote any mass consisting of small particles – “ a mass of smoke, dust, insects etc.” An example for specialisation may be the word “reel”, which finds different usages in different fields – “film reel, fishing reel”.
The above discussed can be presented in a simple sceme:
Ambiguity Vagueness
Homonymy Polysemy
(sense modulation)
broadening of sense specialisation of sense
This approach is of course very “individual”, so to speak. Deciding on ambiguity or vagueness, and homonymy or polysemy, depends much on speakers personal intuition. It is most clear if we turn to dictionaries. Lexicographers usually present homonyms under different lexical entries, and a polysemantic word under one entry. Moreover, different shades of meaning are registered under different numbers within one entry. The structures of the entry for a certain word do not always coincide in different dictionaries. For example, the word “break” as a noun has two entries in Oxford Encyclopaedic Dictionary of English, and one entry in Longman Dictionary of the English Langauge. Under the entry for the word “field” as a noun there are 14 meanings mentioned in the OEDE dictionary, whereas in the LDEL there are only 9.
Every part of speech is involved in polysemy. In the English language, for example, even articles bear different meanings. For example the definite article “the” may occur in different contexts:
A girl and a boy were sitting on a bench. The boy was smiling, but the girl looked angry. (to refer to sb/sth that has already been mentioned).
Another spacecraft was launched to explore the Moon. (used when there is only one of sth)
Who invented the toilet? (used for referring to objects or devises in general)
Polysemy can be revealed only in context. Interestingly, people do not always realise that a certain word has different meanings, when they meet it in a sentence. Surrounding context unfolds in which particular sense the word is used, and it is immediately activated in our mind. It can be presented in a scheme:
S1 S1 S1
V } S2 N } S2 Adj } S2
S3 S 3 S3
Of course, polysemantic words are different in different languages, and a word having several meanings in one language does not necessarily have all of them in the other. Lets for example, compare the senses of the English word “field” to the Russian word “поле”, which both most obviously mean “an area of open land, especially one used for pasture or crops”. The other meaning is “the range of a subject, an activity or an interest”, which the two words also share. But the sentence “The whole field greeted the captains.” would sound weird if translated literally to Russian, because the Russian word “поле” doesn’t have the meaning of “the participants in a sports activity”. The English word also doesn’t have one meaning that the Russian does – “поле” can be used in such a context: “Он исчез из моего поля зрения.” (*“He disappeared from my field of sight”), meaning the distance within someone’s sight.
Understanding the nature of polysemy is very important for the computational linguistics, particularly for creating electronic translators. Nowadays there are different types of such, and they are believed to be able to translate any correctly written text, though it is also a common knowledge that they are still far from being perfect. Thus it is vitally important to know how people’s mind works to pick out the appropriate sense of a word to match it with a context.
III. Hyponymy.
Hyponymy is a paradigmatic sense relation of inclusion, that means that the meaning of one lexical item is included in the meaning of the other. The word with a more general meaning is called the superordinate or hypernym. There are usually several words related to a hypernym in terms of hyponymy, they are called co-hyponyms. For example, English words “fear”, “love”, “happiness”, “hatred”, “passion”, “sadness”, etc., all include the meaning of “emotion”, thus are all hyponyms to “emotion”, which is a hypernym as related to them. Hyponymy is very important for semantics, because most of the vocabulary in any language is linked by such relations, which is one of the ways of grouping words in the language.
It is also a very complex relationship, which can have numerous levels. It depends on person’s own desire and needs. For example, it wouldn’t be a mistake to say that “tuna” is a hyponym for “animal”, but it would be more precise to relate it as shown in the scheme:
ANIMAL
bird mammal
fish insect
marine freshwater
Scombridae Soleidae
tuna scomber
There is no doubt that hyponymy is relevant for linguistics; the question is to what extent. For instance, it is of course essential to know that tuna is an animal, it may be useful to know that it is a fish, but will it damage understanding if a person doesn’t know that it belongs to the Scombridae? There is still no universal answer to this question, it is again a matter of personal decision.
It is very interesting to trace how hyponyms act in a context and how they influence the entailment relations between whole sentences. These are two pairs of sentences containing a hyponym (a) and its hypernym (b), and involved in the relationship of inclusion:
1.(a) Paul gave Cat a rose. (b) Paul gave Cat a flower. – (a) entails (b)
2.(a) Denis saw a mouse. (b) Denis saw an animal. – (a) entails (b)
Lets now look what is happening if we make the sentences negative.
3.(a) Paul didn’t give Cat a rose. (b) Paul didn’t give Cat a flower. – (b) entails (a)
4.(a) Denis didn’t see a mouse. (b) Denis didn’t see an animal. – (b) entails (a)
The relationship of entailment between sentences goes in the opposite directions here, because the fact that, e.g. in 3 Paul didn’t give Cat a rose doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t give her any flower, he might have given her a tulip.
The situation gets even more complicated if the word “all” is added to the sentence:
6.(a) Paul gave Cat all his roses. (b) Paul gave Cat all his flowers. (b) entails (?) (a)
Entailment will again go in the opposite direction, but only under condition that the set of things from the sentence (a) actually exists. In my example 6.(b) will entail 6(a) only if Paul actually had roses among his flowers.
Sometimes the relationship of entailment upsets if a gradable adjective is added, for example:
7.(a) Denis saw a big mouse. (b) Denis saw a big animal. – no entailment
because even a big mouse is not a big animal.
Languages differ in their co-hyponyms and superordinates. Lets, for instance, compare the hyponymic relationship between different alcoholic drinks in British English and in Russian:
British English
Alcoholic drinks
Spirits Non spirits
vodka rum wine ale
whiskey brandy liquor cocktails Smithwick’s Bass
gin larger stout Kilkenny
Beamish Murphy’s
Heineken
Carlsberg Budweiser Satzenbrau
Guinness
Russian
Алкогольные напитки (alkoholic drinks)
водка джин вино пиво коктейли бренди
vodka gin wine beer cocktails brandy
beer
Smithwicks Budweiser
Guinness Heineken Carlsberg
Bass
As we can see from this example, Russian language does not have a word for strong alcoholic drinks, as English does. Moreover, English “ale”, “stout”, and “larger”, are not distinguished between.
An interesting example of differences in languages is also the verb “to go”, which in English is a hypernym for almost all kinds of moving in time and space. For example: 8.(a)I’m driving to work. entails (b) I’m going to work.
9.(a)From Vena we flue to New York. entails (b)From Vena we went to New York.
This is not the case neither in Russian nor in Danish, for in these languages verbs “идти” (Rus) and “at gå” (Dan) in terms of physical movement in space means “going by foot, or walking”. So it obviously sounds weird if we use these verbs in such instances as in the sentences 8.(b), 9(b), considering the fact that it is in both cases a fairly long journey.
10.(a) Jeg gå på arbejdet. (b)Я иду на работу
. I’m walking to work.
11.(a) Han gik fra Vena til NY. (b) Из Вены он пошел в Нью Йорк.
From Vena he walked to New York.*
That means that in English
to go
drive travel
walk fly sail
but in Russian and Danish there is no such a hyponymic group.
IV. Conclusion.
As we can see, hyponymy and polysemy are really relevant for the study of word meaning. Together with other sense relationships between words they help to organize vocabulary into the network of linked units, thus helping to store linguistic knowledge and to select the only one suitable unit from a whole range of possibilities. Investigating such sense relations helps understanding the development of word meaning, its existence in a language and the way it is stored in our mind and revealed in context.
Bibliography.
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A. Akmahajian, R.A. Demers, A. R. Farmer, R.M. Harnish, Linguistics. An Introduction to Language and Communication, The MIT Press, 1997
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James R. Hurford, Brendan Heasely, Semantics. A Coursebook, Cambridge University Press, 1983
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James Pustejovsky, Branimir Boguraev, Lexical semantics: the problem of polysemy, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1996
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John Saeed, Semantics, Oxford : Blackwell, 1997
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Oxford Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the English Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991
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Longman Dictionary of the English Language, Longman, 1991
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Longman Advanced Learners Dictionary, Longman, 1997