Discuss the notions of polysemy and hyponymy and their importance for the study of word meaning.

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Discuss the notions of polysemy and hyponymy and their importance for the study of word meaning.

I. Introduction. Semantics as a study of meaning.

        As a part of linguistics semantics deals with meaning in language. It is often taken for granted that linguistic units studied in grammar contain lexical meaning, thus much more attention is usually given to the rules of combining those units. I think this approach is not quite accurate, for without lexical and grammatical meaning no grammatical rule will make any sense. Only having discovered the nature of meaning we can truly understand the principles of their combining and functioning in the language. Unfortunately, as semantics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, it still remains in a state of diversification. There are quite a number of different approaches and theories in semantics, and many questions are still left unanswered at its very foundations. In this work I won’t go into describing various theories, but try to give my personal view over the given topic.

        There are different types of meaning in the language, and semantics has different levels accordingly. What I will be interested in is lexical semantics, which studies word meaning. In fact it also deals with items of different levels, i.e. morphemes, words themselves (or lexemes), and multi-word units, but here I’ll also simplify it to only one level of lexemes.

        There are thousands of lexemes in each language, and it is completely wrong to think that they exist chaotically in the language; of course they are somehow organised.  To think of them as a list organised in an alphabetic order is also misleading. There is no semantic reality in such organisation; it rather keeps related lexemes apart. So we can suppose that groups of lexemes are related in sense. Taking a closer look at the matter we may discover that there are two main kinds of sense relations between lexemes. “Some result from the way lexemes occur in sequences (syntagmatic relations); others from the way in which lexemes can substitute for each other (paradigmatic relations).” (D. Crystal, Linguistics). One word is usually involved in several such relationships, which makes lexicon more like a network than just a list. Sense relations of polysemy and hyponymy belong to the paradigmatic sense relations.

II. Polysemy.

        Lets first take a look at the sense relationship of polysemy. There’s no singe definition of polysemy on which all linguists agree. One of the extreme views on it, for example, belongs to James Pustejovsky and Bradimir Boguraev, who view every slightest shift in meaning or combinability as polysemy. Their general definition of this phenomenon is quite reasonable. In the book “Lexica Semantics. The Problem of Polysemy” they point out the problem of lexical ambiguity in languages. “Lexical ambiguity is one of the most difficult problems in language processing studies and, not surprisingly, is at the core of lexical semantic research, It is certainly true that most words in a language have more than one meaning, but the ways in which words carry multiple meanings can vary.” Thus they distinguish between “constructive ambiguity”, their term for homonymy, and “complementary ambiguity” – polysemy. These points can not be doubted, but they go a bit too far in further research, as I see it, considering such cases as slight syntagmatic changes to be examples of polysemy. For instance in

                                                  Mary began to read the novel.

                                                  Mary began reading the novel.

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                                                  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 ...

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