Lexical Relations: Homonymy, Polysemy, and Semantic Structure in Linguistics
Lexical Relations
Intralinguistic relations exist between words or lexical units in a language.
Syntagmatic Relations
Define the meaning the word has when it is used in combination with other words in the flow of speech.
Paradigmatic Relations
Define the word meaning through its interrelation with other members of the subgroup in question.
Homonymy
In general, it may be defined as two or more words with the same shape but different meanings and different etymologies: Identical in sound (and form) but different in meaning.
- Difficulty in the establishment of ‘sameness’: We do not make the same distinctions in both speech and writing: lead (metal) – lead (dog’s lead) are spelled the same but pronounced differently: Homographs.
- It is held that languages where short words abound have more homonyms.
- Use of homonyms in fiction: word play and puns.
Full Homonymy
Some words are homonymous in all their forms: e.g., seal (a sea animal) and seal (a design printed on paper by means of a stamp).
Partial Homonymy Between Individual Word-Forms
Although some individual word-forms are homonymous, the whole of the paradigm is not identical. e.g. seal (a sea animal) & (to) seal (to close tightly).
Partial Homonymy Within One Part of Speech
Two verbs: lie /laɪ/ (to be in a horizontal or resting position) and lie /laɪ/ (to make an untrue statement). Partial homonymy as only two word-forms /laɪ/, /laɪz/ are homonymous, all other forms of the two verbs are different.
Polysemy
Monosemantic words are relatively rare, mainly scientific terms, e.g. molecule, and even in those cases, they might develop additional, metaphorical meanings (e.g. he is a molecule, meaning “he is very small” or “he is a very important component”). Polysemantic words are the most: they possess more than one meaning.
- The more common the word the more meanings it has. The actual number of meanings of commonly used words ranges from five to about a hundred.
- Only one of the meanings of a polysemous word will fit into a given context. However, occasionally ambiguity may also arise: e.g. There was a bat under the tree. (A flying mammal? Or an implement used to hit the ball in cricket?).
- Polysemy is an essential condition for language efficiency: It provides economy and flexibility in language.
Problems
Number of Meanings
- One meaning cannot always be delimited and distinguished from another. It is not easy to say without hesitation whether two meanings are the same or different.
- We cannot determine exactly how many meanings a polysemous word has.
- A word may have both a ‘literal’ meaning and one or more ‘transferred’ meanings: ‘metaphor’: when a word appears to have a ‘literal’ and a ‘transferred’ meaning.
Transference of Meanings
Many adjectives may be used either literally for the quality they refer to or with the transferred meaning of being the source of the quality. lit. ‘John is sad’ (he feels sadness). transf. ‘The book is sad’ (it causes someone else to feel sad).
Interrelation and Interdependence of the Various Meanings of the Same Word
- Diachronically, polysemy may be viewed as a historical change in the semantic structure of the word resulting in: the growth and development of or, in general, as a change in the semantic structure of the word.
- Disappearance of some meanings.
- New meanings being added to the ones already existing.
- The rearrangement of these meanings in its semantic structure.
- Synchronically, polysemy is understood as the coexistence of the various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period and the arrangement of these meanings in the semantic structure of the word.
Difficulty in Recognizing Polysemy
- One word with several meanings vs. several words with the same shape – spelling and/or pronunciation?
- Different meanings should be counted as different lexical items
- Words that have multiple related but distinct meanings are polysemous.
- Three criteria: diachronic/etymology, synchronic/semantic and distribution/context.
Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity: “a word with more than one possible meaning in a context”. In nouns, verbs, and prepositions.
Polysemy and Semantic Structure
- Some meaning (or meanings) is representative of the word in isolation (they occur to us when we hear the word or see it written on paper): free or denominative meaning(s).
- Other meanings are perceived only in certain contexts.
- The denotational and central meaning of a word is usually common to different languages, but not the connotational ones: blue (means azul. In English, it is pornography in Spanish pornografia is green).
- The whole semantic structure of words is altogether different in different languages.