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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Jozef Andraš Theoretical Approaches to Polysemy Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, Ph. D. 2018 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… Author’s signature I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc. for her kind supervision, patient guidance and support. I would also like to thank my family for their support during the years of my studies. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 1. Meaning .................................................................................................................. 6 2. Lexical Ambiguity.................................................................................................. 7 3. Polysemy in contrast to homonymy ....................................................................... 9 3.1. Polysemy ................................................................................................................ 9 3.2. Homonymy ........................................................................................................... 10 3.3. Distinction between polysemy and homonymy ................................................... 12 4. Relations between polysemes............................................................................... 14 5. Polysemy in contract to vagueness....................................................................... 17 6. Polysemy within the classical, prototypical and relational approach................... 22 6.1. Polysemy within the classical approach ............................................................... 23 6.2. Polysemy within the prototypical approach ......................................................... 32 6.3. Polysemy within the relational approach ............................................................. 39 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 43 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 46 Résumé ............................................................................................................................ 49 Résumé ............................................................................................................................ 50 Introduction This thesis discusses the phenomenon of polysemy: a single lexical form having two or more related senses (e.g. bleed to death/bleed the radiators; feed the family of five/feed the tomatoes). As the polysemy is one of the most interesting and demanding aspects, it has been examined from several points of view. This thesis deals with the theoretical approaches to polysemy. The author divides this thesis into six chapters. The first chapter introduces the term meaning with respect to the linguistics, as it is crucial to understand it clearly in order to grasp the notion of polysemy. This chapter proposes several notions and levels of the lexical meaning. The second chapter is dedicated to the lexical ambiguity, and explains the term lexeme. The third chapter focuses on the differences between homonymy and polysemy, which are the two instances of the lexical ambiguity, and proposes the criteria to distinguish these two independent phenomena. Moreover, it examines the term monosemy briefly. The fourth chapter talks about the relations between the polysemes (i.e. between the words that have several meanings), which can be either linear (autohyponymy and automeronymy), or non-linear (metaphor and metonymy. The fifth chapter discusses the phenomenon of vagueness and points out how it differs from the polysemy. The sixth chapter, the pivotal chapter of the thesis, clarifies three approaches to the polysemy: classical, prototypical and relational approach. Each theory differs from the others, as each one puts emphasis on different areas. As a result, each of the mentioned theories may come to a different conclusion with regard to the same lexeme. The summary is based on the analysis and comparison of the polysemy, homonymy and vagueness, and the three above-mentioned theories. 5 1. Meaning Semantics is the branch of linguistics that deals with meaning. It is important to emphasize that there are several notions of meaning: some of them are related to linguistic semantics and some of them are not. Löbner proposes that, “linguistic semantics is exclusively concerned with the meanings of linguistic expressions such as words, grammatical forms and sentences, but not with the meanings of actions or phenomena.” (2013: 1) The general definition of meaning is thus not easy. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics by Crystal states that meaning is “the basic notion used in linguistics both as datum and as criterion of analysis: linguists study meaning, and also use meaning as a criterion for studying other aspects of language.” (2008: 298) Meaning may be examined from various points of views. Not only linguists are considerably concerned with it, but there are also other academic disciplines that deal with meaning, for instance philosophy, psychology, sociology, neurology, semiotics and statistics. The theory distinguishes numerous types of meaning. This thesis will deal with only some of them, which the author considers to be the most relevant. The first dichotomy is lexical meaning and grammatical meaning. Cruse states that, “if we characterize lexical meaning as semantic information carried by major lexical units (which for the moment we can take to be nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), then grammatical meaning can be defined as semantic information in a sentence not carried by major lexical units.” (2011: 267) According to Leech, the lexical meaning in its widest sense into seven subtypes: conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflective meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning. (1981: 9) Leech considers the conceptual meaning (referred to as ‘denotative’ or ‘cognitive’ meaning too) to be the core meaning, as it deals with the relationship between a word and the thing it refers to. “My chief reason for assigning priority to 6 conceptual meaning is that it has a complex and sophisticated organization of a kind which may be compared with, and cross-related to, similar organization on the syntactic and phonological levels of language (1981: 9) Out of the seven senses he puts the conceptual meaning on the first place due to its organization. Löbner defines three levels of meaning: expression meaning, utterance meaning and communicative meaning. (2013: 7) Meanwhile the expression meaning is the meaning of an expression in isolation, i.e. with no context, the utterance meaning is the meaning an expression has in a given context. At last, the communicative meaning is the meaning of an utterance in a concrete situation. Riemer distinguishes between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. Sentence meaning is “the compositional meaning of the sentence as constructed out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes.” (2010: 21) Sentence meaning is thus what a sentence means. On the other hand, utterance meaning (or also called speaker meaning) is “the meaning which the words have on a particular occasion of use in the particular context in which they occur.” (2010: 21) That means utterance meaning is what a speaker means when he uses a piece of language, for example words, grammatical forms or sentences. 2. Lexical Ambiguity This chapter discusses the concept of lexical ambiguity. Words have usually more than just one meaning and sentences may also be interpreted in several ways. This phenomenon is called ambiguity: “an expression or an utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way. The notion of ambiguity can be applied to all levels of meaning: to expression meaning, utterance meaning and communicative meaning.” (Löbner 2013: 41) Theory knows several types of ambiguity. 7 Cruse highlights the importance of distinguishing between lexical ambiguity and non-lexical ambiguity, “as not all ambiguity is lexical in origin.” (2011: 100) He states that the source of non-lexical ambiguity is mainly syntax (e.g., old men and women – is it just the men that are old, or are women old as well?), but also the interpretation of simile or metaphors may result in ambiguity (e.g., John works like lightning. (i.e. John is very fast.) John works like lightning – in brief flashes and with lots of noise.) One of the most important terms related to the lexical ambiguity is the term lexeme. Riemer proposes this definition: “The lexeme is the name of the abstract unit which unites all the morphological variants of a single word. Thus, we can say that go, goes, went, have gone and to go all are instantiations of the lexeme to go.” (2013: 17) From his words we can deduce that the lexeme is a linguistic unit carrying lexical meaning. The lexeme can be represented by a single word, but composite expressions may also carry their own lexical meaning (for example idioms or phrasal verbs). Löbner gives a more precise definition and says that a lexeme is defined by the following characteristics: (i) its sound form and its spelling (for languages with a written