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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 ...
The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is often subtle and subjective, and not all sources consider polysemous words to be homonyms. Words such as mouth, meaning either the orifice on one's face, or the opening of a cave or river, are polysemous and may or may not be considered homonyms.
When an ambiguity instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called homonymy. For instance, the English word "row" can denote the action of rowing or to an arrangement of objects. In practice, polysemy and homonymy can be difficult to distinguish. [4]
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
For example, fingers describe all digits on a hand, but the existence of the word thumb for the first finger means that fingers can also be used for "non-thumb digits on a hand". [13] Autohyponymy is also called "vertical polysemy". [a] [14] Horn called this "licensed polysemy", but found that autohyponyms also formed even when there is no ...
In other words, polysemy and homonymy are not handled properly. For example, in the sentence "The club I tried yesterday was great!", it is not clear if the term club is related to the word sense of a club sandwich, clubhouse, golf club, or any other sense that club might have. The necessity to accommodate multiple meanings per word in ...
Examples are the variation in senses of the term "wood wool" and in those of the word "bean". This pattern entails that natural language can often lack explicitness about hyponymy and hypernymy. Much more than programming languages do, it relies on context instead of explicitness; meaning is implicit within a context. Common examples are as ...
Monosemy as a methodology for analysis is based on the recognition that almost all cases of polysemy (where a word is understood to have multiple meanings) require context in order to differentiate these supposed meanings.