Review article about polysemy

Reviewed by Lia Silveria Sinaga

Title      : Polysemy A second language pedagogical concern

Post by    : Kevin Parent

                  Victoria University of Wellington, 2009
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.