Polysemy and Homonymy and their Importance for the Study of Word Meaning

In this article we examine the concepts of polysemy and homonymy. After a broad overview of the topic we focus on the treatment of several examples in dictionaries and indicate how listing problems can arise. We look at how polysemy and honomymy are dealt with in Chinese - a language rich in ambiguous words full of connotations and associations and we look at some of the ensuing problems facing Chinese dictionary writers and suggest a user friendly model for ambiguous lexical entries. We explore how several English words such as the polysemous preposition \u27over\u27 can be dealt with in terms of image schemas and how this indicates a structured system in the mental lexicon. Vyvyan Evan\u27s treatment of \u27time\u27 is also examined, his argument as to how it might be arranged in semantic memory and his conclusions about the lexicon having systematic semantic structure. We conclude by conceding that more work is required before the issues addressed in this paper can be unambiguously resolved

Representation and processing of semantic ambiguity

One of the established findings in the psycholinguistic literature is that semantic ambiguity (e.g., “dog/tree bark”) slows word comprehension in neutral/ minimal context, though it is not entirely clear why this happens. Under the “semantic competition” account, this ambiguity disadvantage effect is due to competition between multiple semantic representations in the race for activation. Under the alternative “decision-making” account, it is due to decision-making difficulties in response selection. This thesis tests the two accounts by investigating in detail the ambiguity disadvantage in semantic relatedness decisions. Chapters 2-4 concentrate on homonyms, words with multiple unrelated meanings. The findings show that the ambiguity disadvantage effect arises only when the different meanings of homonyms are of comparable frequency (e.g., “football/electric fan”), and are therefore initially activated in parallel. Critically, homonymy has this effect during semantic activation of the ambiguous word, not during response selection. This finding, in particular, refutes any idea that the ambiguity disadvantage is due to decision making in response selection. Chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on polysemes, words with multiple related senses. The findings show that the ambiguity disadvantage effect arises for polysemes with irregular sense extension (e.g., “restaurant/website menu”), but not for polysemes with regular (e.g., “fluffy/marinated rabbit”) or figurative sense extension (e.g., “wooden/authoritative chair”). The latter two escape competition because they have only one semantic representation for the dominant sense, with rules of sense extension to derive the alternative sense on-line. Taken together, this thesis establishes that the ambiguity disadvantage is due to semantic competition but is restricted to some forms of ambiguity only. This is because ambiguous words differ in how their meanings are represented and processed, as delineated in this work