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For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [3] Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy ...
Further is the explanation of one of the alternative models suggested by Ross, [14] which is a more complex typology consisting of nine combinations of encoding and decoding positions (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The reasons why the original model needs to be revisited and the alternative model description to follow.
When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy. For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or the foot of a pot.
Polysemy entails a common historic root to a word or phrase. Broad medical terms usually followed by qualifiers, such as those in relation to certain conditions or types of anatomical locations are polysemic, and older conceptual words are with few exceptions highly polysemic (and usually beyond shades of similar meaning into the realms of being ambiguous).
These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that non-European languages sometimes made more specific semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water, is not always possible.
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
Barry Clarke suggested that, in order to determine whether a particular dispute was a consequence of true polysemy or inadvertent homonymy, one should seek to "locate the source of the dispute"; and in doing so, one might find that the source was "within the concept itself", or "[within] some underlying non-conceptual disagreement between the contestants".
For example, the two senses which are distinguished in English as people and village are colexified in Spanish, which uses pueblo in both cases. Colexification is meant as a neutral descriptive term that avoids distinguishing between vagueness , polysemy , and homonymy .