نگاهي تازه به مسيله چندمعنايي واژگاني

A Fresh Approach to the Question of Lexical Polysemy

This scholarly paper deals with the question of polysemy, the fact that in any given language, words, phrases and sentences, even monosyllabic morphemes, often have more than one meaning. The author first defines the question, reviews the opinions of linguists on the subject, distinguishes between polysemy and homonymy, and then passes on to his own findings on the subject. The author believes that most semanticists so far have approached the question of polysemy by looking at words in isolation, irrespective of the relations of association and substitution that exist between them, whereas in everyday speech (which he calls automatic language) the meaning of any given word shifts under the influence of the words that precede or succeed it, and that one is almost always led to the exact meaning of a word in a given situation by its context. And then he goes on to demonstrate these contextual shifts of meaning by the examples that he has collected and studied. In the question of polysemy, he concludes, context is always a key factor. Here is the authorʹs own summation of the paper: "In this paper the author endeavoured to prove, by examining numerous specimens, that in automatic language, the phenomenon of polysemy is not limited to certain words only, but extends, depending on selection or combination, to all the units of the lexical system in the language. Whereas homonymy is a special case, and should not be examined, methodologically speaking, side by side with polysemy. On the other hand, it seems possible to explain polysemy by `semantic increaseʹ and `semantic decrease,ʹ (authorʹs terms), with the provision that the units of the system are considered within the context of the same system while paying close attention to the bilateral relations that exist between these units. Because it is only under these circumstances that one can talk of a systemic study of a language."