Re: Polysemy

On 6/13/07, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:
> Others have suggested getting a dictionary and counting, I
> suggest you start with counting the meanings of "go" (the verb).
That's one of the gray cases IMO - go, get, be, etc where they're
kindasorta helping verbs and it gets just weird, rather than them
being clearly strongly contentful.

And yeah I could get a dictionary and count, but the point of asking
was that hopefully someone's done that boring part already. :-)

> However, AFMCL there are words which I call "bagwords",
...
> * are polysemous in such a way that you shouldn't pick one
>  meaning when encountering the word, but all of them,
>  simultaneously.
Interesting variant. E.g. please?

On 6/13/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> I think most of us Anglophones interpret that as more than one word
> ("a couple/three").  It's  short for something like "a couple or
> three".
Hm. For me it's one word that still parses as short for "a couple or three". :-P

> Can I just ask how you pronounce "polysemy" and "polysemous"?
I normally pronounce it p@l Is' 3 mi" (iirc xsampa right).

> But OK,  polysemy is a subset of homophony/homonymy,
> confined to words which have diverged in meaning from a single
> original concept, versus merely having evolved to sound/be spelled
> like a totally unrelated word.  Got it.  Let's see.
I mean both, though primarily the former as more interesting from a
cognitive perspective (a la "Women, Fire, & Dangerous Things")



I agree with all the posters so far that it's probably true that the
"simplest" words - go, get, up, [insert preposition here], [insert
helping verb here], etc are most frequently very polysemous. But
somehow that feels ... not quite what I was looking for (though
they're certainly interesting & diverse).

I'd like the more obvious kind of polysemy one gets with a word like
"spirit" (ghost, alcohol, passion, disappear (trans.), quickly, etc).

I'm not overly concerned with etymologies, though it's better when you
can (somewhat laboriously) trace a path to a common ancestor-idea -
again, WF&DT and the other examples in that book come to mind - but
the "accidental" sort where phonology evolutions collide is of
interest as well.

Also better if the resulting meanings are (to an offhand look) wildly
divergent - again as in 'spirit', "ghost" and "alchohol" seem nearly
unrelated, "disappear (trans.)" takes a bit to link up to "ghost",
etc.

Hopefully that makes my question a bit clearer. :-)

Thanks,
- Sai

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