Reviewed by Lia Silveria Sinaga
Title : Polysemy A second language pedagogical concern
Post by : Kevin Parent
Victoria University of Wellington, 2009
Pages : 241 pages
Pages : 241 pages
Review article about polysemy
Part
1: Theoretical concerns of polysemy
Chapter one: The language learner and
the polyseme
We
have examined why polysemy can be a very real problem for learners. Although we
have not yet defined what is meant by polysemy, we have examined some related
basic concepts. Without having yet defined it, we have established by
elimination that polysemy regards related senses, as opposed to homonymy, which
are naturally unrelated, as opposed to monosemy, and that it should be mostly
the domain of semantics, as opposed to pragmatics. Contextual variation,
including differences in arguments a word may take, have no influence on its
claim to monosemy. We have dissociated ourselves from the lexicographical
authority in this matter and, with pedagogy as our ultimate goal, have argued
for a synchronic view.
Chapter
two: Polysemy and types of polysemes
For example some researchers, especially
in generative areas, see chickens as polysemous animals for animals and meat,
with evidence that if we have two words of cow and cow (or pig: pig, deer:
venison, etc.) but not For chickens Turkey, crab, etc.), then the chicken must
be polysemous by way of analogy (beef → cow, chicken → chicken). Someone who
eats chicken meat still eat birds; The fact that it had been killed, cut and
cooked did not change it. Splits of beef and beef and other similar cases
(pork, venison) may be strange, not unpartared chickens. The second point to
keep in mind about the completeness of the list is that we only check for the
type of polysemy that is relevant to the second language learner. As mentioned
above, pragmatics involve a world of knowledge that may be inexhaustible. Words
are discrete and can be calculated; Their reference reference is actually not.
The idea of a simple word
like a book includes every book ever written in any language and also every
edition, not to mention a book that has not been written, always gives a
moment's appreciation; the scope of even the most basic words speaks volumes
about the language economy. (And polysemy is part of a machine that maintains
economic words). Linguists often write sentences to show ambiguity, but we know
that very few sentences are completely ambiguous in the real discourse. (The
word meaning in Clark Terry blowing trumpets means, of course, does not carry
the meaning of 'average' here). As teachers, we need to make learners aware of
the extent to which polysemy plays in the language so they seek it in cases
where they understand all the words but not the whole. Once they search for it,
there must still be examples where polyseme is more prominent as a source of
confusion than others. I suspect, for example, that a learner fails to
understand 'He is upset about the general taste of the encounter' can show a
sense of polysemy competitor, especially when assuming a meeting has been
referred (either they can accurately predict the meaning is another matter, but
pinpoint That is the first step.) I'm not so sure that polyseme can be so
easily identified in the last word of 'I want to buy it the ring, but I'm a
little embarrassed.' (Divorced from context, it's ambiguous even for native
speakers.) The shy meaning here is 'not having enough money'). Will a student
face a punishment? 'He does not accept a job offer because he expects' to
realize that the woman is pregnant, or will they make the assumption that she
is expecting another job offer to come through? And of course, the sentence may
have more than one unknown polyseme: At last he made it to the battery and, in
anger, depleted his magazine in one journey. This raises another question. Very
famous words (such as batteries and magazines) are more difficult to suspect as.
Types of polysemy : Lexical metaphor
The first type of polysemy we will
examine is the kind that relies heavily on metaphor and has a clear-cut
literal/metaphoric divide. The order in which the various types of polysemy are
presented is determined by the application of the diagnostic tests employed to
reveal them, which need to be executed in this order. An example of lexical
metaphor, one I will use time and again throughout this thesis, is flavour with
its literal meaning of that which is perceived via the sense of taste (aided by
smell) and a metaphoric sense referring to vague qualities perceived by other
senses, usually orally or aurally, as in a painting or melody having a Spanish
flavour.
Vicariant
polysemy
This second type of polysemy is the
afore-mentioned variety of which hot is an example. Readers may have already
begun objecting to 'spicy' hot not being considered a metaphoric extension of
'temperature' hot. In fact, I've no doubt that traditional rhetoric could
explain it as a metaphor, but that it fails the 'literally' test reveals it as
a different kind of polyseme. Whatever its etymology, the 'spicy' sense is not
as parasitic upon the 'temperature' sense as the metaphoric reading of flavour
is upon its literal counterpart. The 'spicy' sense is
more autonomous, and the two senses are more balanced.
Pragmatics
and word meaning
Although
I've argued at length that pragmatics alone fails to account for polysemy but rather for contextual
variations, the illusion of polysemy is strong enough that these 'senses' are
teachable. Unlike the above two types of pure polysemy, these pseudo-polysemes
do not have discrete sense boundaries.The noun seed, for example, is either a
literal sense or a metaphoric sense, and modern either means 'contemporary'or
else it refers to a movement or era in art history (if you'll pardon this
morphological atrocity, pre-post-modern), but with pseudo-polysemes, the
clear-cut distinctions are lost. Here,
senses may blend into
each other with
no clear boundary or, a
more preferable way to view it, there is but the one sense and a variety
of contexts.
Syntax
and word meaning
Here I can be brief because the topic
lends itself to brevity and would not necessarily benefit from the same full
treatment accorded to semantics and pragmatics. My wish here is only to
demonstrate that what may appear to be polysemy may in fact be an entirely
syntactic operation, the seeming semantic contrast being a by-product.The words
I address here are those such as expect, touch, promise, reveal and tell but
when used in the following examples:She declined the job offer because she was
expecting, It was a very touching movie, He is a promising young actor.
Chapter
three: The flavour of polysemy and the polysemy of flavor
The purpose of the previous case study
was to illuminate a larger problem with the aim of making a general claim about
monosemy, that many words whose polysemy status is assumed are actually
monosemic if pragmatics are taken into account. With one exception, the
recorded behavior of taste is an observation of this word only and not another
lexical metaphor, and certainly not another polisem. One such exception assumes
the elements are equally for the literal and metaphorical sense of the lexical
metaphor. It seems that metaphorical meanings are forced to import certain
elements from the sense of the literal source. Meaning can not be metaphorical
(in the sense of single-lexeme we have Been working with) without borrowing
some components from the actual subcategories. Actually, which elements are
ported is not something I'm ready to declare, partly because lexical metaphors
are a rarer category than polysemy or homonymy vicariant, and in this category,
nouns are just one type, but necessary for comparison with taste. However, it
can be safely said that the elements common to both senses will show a degree
of ambiguity-that is, they can not be tied to the specific area of the literal
sense but must be able to generalize the broader spectrum of metaphoric usage.
Chapter
four: From theory to application
To
label this section 'Conclusion' is misleading because the only thing being concluded
is the beginning. What I've presented so far is a summary of the literature on
the subject of polysemy and related topics and an exposition of my own beliefs
on the matter. Rather than providing a litany of article and book titles with a
few cursory comments to demonstrate I've read them, I've instead attempted to
analyse a few, most notably Ruhl and Hoey. As such, there are some names that
readers may be expecting whom I have mentioned in passing if at all such as
Pustejovsky, Lakoff and Rosch. Taken as our starting point, the literature on
the subject is a spotty nebula and my goal here has been to connect a line
between those that form the straightest path to our goal of second language
pedagogy, stopping at a few key points along the way, as connecting them all
would be an aimless journey full of random turns and sudden jumps, leaving in our
wake barely visited rest areas.We turn next to what students may already know
about polysemy and accounts of which words have been particularly troublesome for
them.
Part
2: Pedagogical aspects of polysemy
Chapter
five: Polysemy encounters and the dictionary
Raising
awareness of the concepts of related and unrelated meanings is the most
rudimentary step in the chain of decoding polysemy encounters. Without it,
learners will not suspect a known word form of having an unknown meaning, and
without this, any further steps in the flowchart are not reached and the blame
for not understanding the sentence is mis-allocated, perhaps onto the syntax or
onto learners themselves.
Polysemy in
teacher resource texts
McCarthy (1990), also entitled simply Vocabulary, fares better. It raises the
distinction between polysemy and homonymy, suggests that etymology can
sometimes resolve the issue but also confuse matters, mentions monosemy,
implies that there may be a finite number of polysemous senses, and asks how we
can know when a learner has learned a polysemous word a question addressed in
the following section of this chapter. Also examined are the notions of central
and peripheral meanings and Kellerman's (1986) research on learners'
expectations of peripheral meanings.
As mentioned in chapter three, Nation (1990, 2001)
introduces the concept of 'underlying meaning' and reports on the work of
Visser (1989), which finally presents a pedagogical procedure
for teaching polysemes. Students, working in groups, are
presented
with two meanings of a polyseme in context and are given a simple task for each
meaning. After this, they are asked to state what features are common to both
senses. For example, for the word emerge, they are given, in the first column.
Chapter
six: Afterword. Some loose thoughts on polysemy, meaning and learning
John
Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding since you begin doctoral work
without the knowledge you will have gained by the end, I should think most
dissertations don't end up anywhere near where they were expected to go at the
beginning. Mine has been no exception. The expectations I had when beginning
this work seem simple in retrospect, thinking
this would be a dissertation on learners tacking a few new meanings on
to some words they already knew, when it, in fact, has led me to a new understanding
of the functioning of language as a whole. The work and thinking I've done
regarding polysemy became a Socratic elenchus: my once-clear knowledge of
polysemy (I knew what it was, ironically, in adictionary-definition sort of
way) dissolved and disappeared the closer I examined it. An understanding of
polysemy strikes, sooner or later, at
the very heart of the philosophical aspects of language, and there were days in
which I was dangerously close to claiming that language didn't exist and
probably would have were I not paying so much to write a thesis on it.
Strengthen of this article is :
Polysemy is very important for us to learn, by learning
about polysemy then we can understand the meaning / meaning of every word we
say.
Weakness of this articles :
For the moment that I know, the more meaning the word the more difficult it
is to determine the selection of words to be used.
Conclusion :
From the above description can be concluded that the meaning, information,
and intent have different respectively. Meaning is a linguistic sign that
usually refers to a referent. While information is a symptom outside of
congregation. And the intent is a symptom outside of speech as well, but the
difference with information is if information is something outside of speech
seen in terms of object or that is discussed, then the intention is something
outside of speech seen in terms of subject or utterance.
