Re: Polysemy

On 6/12/07, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

> 1. What are the most polysemous** words in English?
As for verbs, I suspect that "go" is right up there among
the most polysemous, as taliesin suggested.  Probably several
prepositions would be high on the list too -- e.g. "of", "on", "in".

> 2. Where can I find a list of the average polysemy per word of the
> most common (i.e. non technical/jargon) words across many languages?
I suspect it would be hard to automatte that kind of study.  You'd
need electronically tractable dictionaries of many languages,
and probably you would need to write a separate script for each
dictionary to get the average definitions per word.

> 3. What is the average polysemy in YOUR languages? Any comments on why
> etc etc open question?
In gzb there is little polysemy of the "multiple completely unrelated meanings"
kind.  But many words have a very broad meaning that would translate
into other languages with a number of different words in diffferent contexts.
For instance "du" very broadly means "section" or "part" - it can mean
a chapter of a book, a room of a house, a lane of a road, etc.

In a few cases a word has an archaic, deprecated sense that is
unrelated or distantly related to its current sense; or the lexicon
notes that a word may have variant forms (which is just me making
a record of my own usage errors, for future reference), one of which
may be identical to the primary form of another word.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry