Definition:
The association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. A polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. Adjective: polysemous. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "many signs"Examples and Observations:
- Sports Illustrated can be bought for 1 dollar or 35 million dollars; the first is something you can read and later start a fire with, the second is a particular company that produces the magazine you just read. Such polysemy can give rise to a special ambiguity (He left the bank five minutes ago, He left the bank five years ago). Sometimes dictionaries use history to decide whether a particular entry is a case of one word with two related meanings, or two separate words, but this can be tricky. Even though pupil (eye) and pupil (student) are historically linked, they are intuitively as unrelated as bat (implement) and bat (animal)."
(Adrian Akmajian, et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. MIT Press, 2001) - "We adopt as a working hypothesis the view that almost every word is more or less polysemous, with senses linked to a prototype by a set of relational semantic principles which incorporate a greater or lesser amount of flexibility. We follow the now common practice in polysemy research and regard polysemy as a graded phenomenon . . ., where contrastive polysemy deals with homonyms such as match (a small stick with a tip which ignites when scraped on a rough surface) and match (contest in a game or sport), whereas complementary polysemy deals with interrelated semantic aspects of a word, such as, in the case of record, for example, the physical object and the music."
(Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke, "Polysemy and Flexibility," Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Walter de Gruyter, 2003)
Pronunciation: POLE-eh-see-me, poe-li-SEE-me
