POLYSEMY

In this essay, introduction and etymology of polysemy will be briefly explained,definition of polysemy, polysemy and ambiguity, examples of polysemy, how polysemy differs from homonymy, and the examples and the  problem of polysemy, ambiguity and homonymy  in the real life will also be explained and described.

Polysemy has widely known as a lexical semantics. It is largely unproblematic from the perspective of communication.However, many words become ambiguous because many meanings are represented by one word,and there are alsothe distinct words which people make it as one sense because of the same form. We have different interpretation toward the words because of ambiguity whichcouldlead to the humorous of using words or sentences in communication. That is, the terms of polysemy is closely associated to the term of ambiguity and homonymy, many words are the same but have multiple meanings. Words are different depend on where it occurs, or depend on where it is collocated (collocation).Before turning to the definition of polysemy, I would like first to start with the etymology of polysemy. 

The word polysemy comes from the Greek “poly” means “many” and “sema” means “sign”. Polysemy is the words which gives many signs or meanings. In another word it is the capacity for a word, phrase, or sign to have multiple meanings. According to linguistic literature, polysemy is the phenomenon when a single word has two or more meanings, no matter how meaning is defined in a given approach. According to Booij (2005), Polysemy occurs when a morpheme or word has more than one meaning, but with some systematic relation between these different meanings. The example from Booij, the word “head” has three meanings: The top part of human body and some other higher animals; person (as in dinner at 20 dollars a head); leader. There are many more meanings for head;the first meaning is the primary meaning of this word. The second meaning is derived from this primary meaning through the semantics mechanism of metonymyin which word is interpretedas to denote something that is associated with the object that it literally denotes.  It means that the word is close to its meaning in the dictionary or its original meaning,in this case, the word head is used to denote the person who is the owner of the head. In the third meaning is the metaphorical use, just as a head in its literal sense governs the body to which it belongs, in this case, the leader is usually placed as a superior, that is, headwhich has literal meaning as the top of the human body has a metaphorical meaning as the leader,and Booij consider this is the case of polysemy.

That is, according to Petho (1999), those two or more meanings should be related to each other.In order to make us more understand about the polysemy, there is also the terms which is closely associated to the polysemy, namelyambiguity (adjective: ambiguous). Ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings in a single passage. Likewise, if a word has two or more unrelated meanings, either in the same form or pronunciation, in this case, we talk about homonymy,it is an ambiguity of a different kind from polysemy.Before turning to the homonymy, we have first considered about ambiguity. Ambiguity is a term used to characterize phenomena which have more than only one meaning but distinct from each other. That is the reason a single expression may lead to multiple interpretations. In this case, ambiguity isindicatedas particular expressions that have more than one meaning, in natural language, many wordsand sentences are ambiguous because of the fact that wordscover several distinct meanings.

Furthermore, an expression or utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way (Löbner 2002: p. 39). There are two kinds of ambiguity; the first is the lexical ambiguity which is concerned with multiple interpretations of lexemes. A word is ambiguous if it involves two lexical items that have identical forms, but unrelated meanings.  For example, a word ''ball'' may either denote the round object which is used in games like football, volleyball or basketball, or it can be used to refer to a large formal social event in which people dance. Both forms are identically written and pronounced but just accidentally share the same form, “ball” in the sense of the round object originates in the Old Norse word ‘ballr’, whereas “ball” as the formal event comes from Greek ‘ballizar’ means to dance. That is, unlike polysemy, “ball” is not one word, but two different words.Lexical ambiguity emphasizes on the two different words that have unrelated meaning but still have the same form and pronunciation (the whole relationship with homonymy).

Besides, there is also the structural ambiguity. Structural ambiguity is a result of two or more different syntactic structures that can be attributed to one string of words. It means that a sentence is structurally ambiguous not because it contains a single lexeme that has several distinct meanings (unlike polysemy), instead of the syntactic structure of the sentence which causes multiple interpretations.The example from Farmasari in the clarity of writing a letter: “the manager gave his secretary a cheque,and her husband a watch”. This sentence has two ways in my interpretations; it is either denotes the husband of the manager or the husband of the secretary.  It can be concluded that it is unclear in thesyntactic structure (ambiguity).  Another example, “young boys and girls like reading novel”. This sentence is syntactically ambiguous, because the reference of ''young'' is unclear. It may either be that ‘‘(young boys) and girls like reading novel'', or ‘‘young (boys and girls) like reading novel''. The structural analysis shows that the sentence may be interpreted in a way that ''young'' only refers to the boys, or it may be that it refers to boys and girls. Therefore, there could be different between polysemy and ambiguity from the perspective of semantics.

Unlike the ambiguity which concernsto the structural of the sentence, polysemy emphasizes on one lexeme that has multiple meaning, that meaning should be correlated each other. There are more examples, in the sentence “the foot of mountain”, the word “foot” makes use of the polysemous lexeme ''foot'' and denotes the bottom part of the mountain, as well as a person’s ''foot'' refers to the bottom part of the human body. That is, polysemy has primary (literal) and secondary (metaphorical) meaning that are related. Conversely, since a word has two or more unrelated meanings, that can be either has the same pronunciation (homophone) and the same written form (homograph) with the different or unrelated meaning, then we called it as homonymy. There is a figure to differentiate between those two definitions:

According to the figure, one entry of the word represents polysemy, whereas the word with different entry is homonymy, which has the same form (or sound) but unrelated meaning. In another word, homonymy has a relation between two lexemes because they have the same form but have unrelated meaning. 

Therefore, we have to consider about two different kind of homonymy. Homophone occurs when words (two words) are pronounced identically but they have different written form. For example, the word here and hear have the same pronunciation /hIǝʳ/. That is, they have different form and meaning but have the same pronunciation (Hidayat: 1997). Since the two words with the same spelling as another but a completely different meaning (unrelated meaning) then we called it as homograph. The sentence “Will you please close that door?” and the sentence “The tiger was now so close that I could smell it”. That is, the word close has the same form (and may have the same pronunciation) but unrelated meaning. What we can consider is that there is so different between the term of “polysemy” and “homonymy” through the semantics perspective. Polysemy must be related in meaning, whereas homonymy must not be related in meaning. Again, unlike ambiguity and homonymy, polysemy is one word that has several closely related senses; native speaker has clear intuition that the different senses are related to each other. That is, polysemy closed relatedness in meaning which is usually connected to metaphorical use. Dictionary has to decide whether a particular word is to be indicated in terms of polysemy or homonymy. A polisemic word will be treated as a single entry and homonymous will have separate entry for each of the homonym.

Moreover, the dictionary usually bases their decisions upon etymology. If identical form has different origin, they are treated as homonyms and given separated entries.As the example of the word “ball” (originates from balr), which means game like football, and the word “ball” (originates from the word ballizar) which means to dance. Conversely, if they have one origin even if they have different meaning they are treated as polysemic and given one entry. Afterward, there are some examples of polysemy, ambiguity and homonymy (takes from the handout of my translation subject) which have been analyzed:

1.    In Paris hotel elevator “please leaves your values at the front of desk”. According to what I know, the word “values” has two meaning, the first meaning is that an important or usefulness thing, the second meaning is that our moral principles which is the people think it is important (our attitude). Because this word has two meaning that are related, then it is a polysemy.

2.   In a Zurich hotel: “because of the impropriety of entertaining guest of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.” Lobby is the one word that has two meaning; the primary meaning is that the area in a hotel that has corridors. The secondary meaning is lobby means a member or government of the council where we ask a support or help. My wrong interpretation is that lobby can be used as a place or area to entertain the guest of the opposite sex. The word lobby in this sentence must be polysemy, also, it make the sentence become ambiguity.

3.   In the lobby of Moscow hotel across from a Russian Orthodox monastery: “you are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artist, and writer are buried daily except Thursday”. When I read this sentence, I have wrong interpretation that they are buried everyday except Thursday. Instead, we can visit them daily except Thursday. There is between the words buried and daily shouldbe a comma. Thusthis is an ambiguity of the syntactic structure of the sentence.

4.   Advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: “would you like to ride on your own ass?” according to what I know, ass is the two words in different entry. In one entry, ass (from old English assa) means an animal which is related to a horse that smaller and has long ears. And in another entry, ass (from Old English ærs, ears; akin to Old High German & Old Norse) means buttocks. These words known before 12th century. So these words must be homonymy. 

That is some examples of written communication in order to make clear about polysemy and how it differs from homonymy. The word could be sometimes is polysemy, and could be homonymy. Like these simple sentences:

1)      “I have a book”

2)      “I have headache”

3)      “I have been working my assignment”

The word “have” means possessioneither in two sentences (1 and 2). But, it is become homonymy when we compare those with the sentence (3), in this case of “have” is not mean possession, instead of an auxiliary verb. That is, “have” in (1) and (2) is one word that has related meaning, so it is polysemy, whereas, sentence (3) does not mean possession instead of auxiliary verb. Thusif we compare the word “have” in the sentence (1) and (2) with the word “have” in sentence (3) become homonymy, because they have the same form but unrelated inmeaning.

            In conclusion, polysemy is one word or lexeme that has two or more than one meaning which is correlates each other and it must be in one entry in the dictionary. Polysemy is closely associated with ambiguity, which presents two or more possible meanings in a single passage, and homonymy which is have unrelated meaning either in the same pronunciation (homophone) or in the same spelling (homograph), it is must be in different entry in the dictionary because of the different origin (etymology) of word. In addition, polysemy, ambiguity and homonymy may cause many problemsof words and sentences that we can find in our real life of communication.

References:

Booij, G. 2007. The grammar of words. An introduction to linguistic morphology: second edition. United States: Oxford University Press.

Fellbaum, C. 1990. English verbs as a Semantic Net. United States: Oxford University press.

Hidayat, R. 1997. Kosa kata bahasainggris.Yogyakarta: pustakapelajar.

Farmasari, S. Business English.BahasaInggris FKIP – Unram.

Falkum, I.L. 2011.The semantics and pragmatics of polysemy: A relevance Theoretic Account.discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1139079/1/1139079.pdf‎. Access on Wednesday, 25^th December, 2013.

Adelstein, A. and Maria Teresa. 2001. The specificity of units with specialized meaning: explanatory factor. www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s0102. Access on Tuesday, 24^th December, 2013.

Kovacs, E. 2011.Polysemy in traditional vs. cognitive linguistics.Eger Journal English studies XI (2011) 3-9.

Peth, G. 1999. WHAT IS POLYSEMY? —A SURVEY OF CURRENT RESEARCH AND RESULTS.193.6.132.75/honlap/whatispolysemy.pdf‎.  Access on Thursday, 26^thst, R. Polysemy. http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/polysemyterm.htm. Access on Wednesday, 25^th 2013.

http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php?title=Ambiguity,_Polysemy_and_Vagueness&action. Access on Thursday, 26^th December, 2013.