New Issues in Polysemy
Vitoria-Gasteiz
Spain
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Polysemy, where a single word form is associated with several different meanings (e.g., ‘run a mile’, ‘run a shop’, ‘run late’, ‘run on gasoline’, and so on), proliferates in natural languages. While seldom a problem for language users in communication, polysemy raises a host of challenging issues for theories of lexical semantics and pragmatics. Central questions are the representation of polysemous senses in long-term memory, how hearers pick out the contextually appropriate sense of a polysemous word, and how novel senses arise in the course of communication. This workshop brings together scholars working on polysemy in different branches of linguistics, including formal and computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, and seeks to provide an opportunity for discussion and exchange of ideas across these fields.
A cross-cutting issue is the very nature of polysemy: Does it have a primarily linguistic basis, e.g., derived by the application of lexical rules? Is it essentially cognitive, and just a linguistic reflection of how cognitive categories are structured more generally? Or is it a mainly communicative phenomenon, determined by pragmatic processes operating at the level of individual words? To what extent does the available empirical evidence shed light on these questions?
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