Polysemy has only recently entered the debate on semantic minimalism and contextualism. This is surprising considering that the key linguistic examples discussed in the debate, such as ‘John cut the grass’ or ‘The leaf is green’ appear to be prime examples of polysemy. Moreover, François Recanati recently argued that the mere existence of polysemy falsi!es semantic minimalism and supports radical contextualism. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the minimalism-contextualism debate relates to polysemy. This (...) connection turns out to be far from clear-cut. This is partly due to the fact that the term ‘polysemy’ is used in a number of different ways in the literature, which will be reviewed in this paper. Finally, I discuss and reject Recanati’s claim that the existence of polysemy supports radical contextualism against moderate versions and semantic minimalism. I show that minimalism has a number of plausible options to account for polysemy. (shrink)

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon where a word has more than one sense. Polysemy is important to philosophy. This article considers four related strands of discussion in philosophy in which polysemy plays a crucial role: (i) Chomsky's argument against externalist semantics; (ii) copredication and zeugma; (iii) semantic accounts of philosophically significant terms; and (iv) metaphysical debates.

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I (...) aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning. (shrink)

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic (...) polysemy and semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy. (shrink)

Most theories of concepts take concepts to be structured bodies of information used in categorization and inference. This paper argues for a version of atomism, on which concepts are unstructured symbols. However, traditional Fodorian atomism is falsified by polysemy and fails to provide an account of how concepts figure in cognition. This paper argues that concepts are generative pointers, that is, unstructured symbols that point to memory locations where cognitively useful bodies of information are stored and can be deployed (...) to resolve polysemy. The notion of generative pointers allows for unresolved ambiguity in thought and provides a basis for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Polysemy is a term used in semantic and lexical analysis to describe a word with multiple meanings. Although such words present few difficulties in everyday communication, they do pose near-intractable problems for linguists and lexicographers. The contributors in this volume consider the implications of these problems for linguistic theory and how they may be addressed in computational linguistics.

Orthodoxy assumes that the first-person thoughts of an individual are anchored to a stable object. I challenge this assumption by arguing that “I” is polysemous. The perspectival anchor of a first-person thought could be the bearer of the thought, the agent, the bearer of perception, or a body, to name just a few options. These different possible anchors do not form a unity. So, a unified or minimal self cannot, without argument, be posited as the stable anchor of on individual’s (...) first-person thoughts. I show how the polysemy of “I” can be analyzed in terms of polysemous mental files. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Copredication, as exhibited by sentences such as ‘That book is heavy but informative,’ is commonly seen as a phenomenon that is tied to sentences featuring polysemous expressions. David Liebesman and Ofra Magidor have recently attacked this view by arguing that ‘book’ has a single context-sensitive sense. The first aim of the present paper is to show that Liebesman and Magidor are wrong to claim that ‘book’ is univocal, but that they may nonetheless be right to question that copredication requires (...) polysemy. Its second aim is to consider implications of this result for the debates on copredication and on semantic variability. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two (...) distinct but related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

The paper argues for a model of polysemy based on the blueprint offered by Paul Pietroski whereby the meaning of a lexical item is an instruction to fetch a concept from an address. We show that the bare idea of fetching admits of a deep construal, where a concept is fetched, and a shallow construal, where the instruction merely links a lexical item to an address without automatically retrieving anything from the address; retrieval only occurs when the item is (...) embedded within a syntactic structure. We offer considerations in favour of the shallow construal, which is consistent with a root conception of lexical items. (shrink)

Based on the existence of polysemy (e.g., lunch can refer to both food and events), it is argued that central tenets of externalist semantics and Fodorian concept atomism, an externalist theory on which words lack semantic structure, are unsound. We evaluate the premise that these arguments rely on—that polysemous words have separate, finer‐grained senses. We survey the evidence across psychology and linguistics and argue that it shows that polysemy does not exist, at least not in this “sense”. The (...) upshot is that if polysemy does not exist, it cannot pose a problem for atomism or externalism. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity has classically been categorized into two kinds. Homonyms are single word forms that map to multiple, unrelated meanings (e.g., “bat” meaning baseball equipment or a flying mammal). Polysemes are single word forms that map to multiple, related senses (e.g., “breakfast” meaning a plate of food or an event). Yet there is a longstanding debate as to whether polysemy and homonymy reflect distinct cognitive representations. Some (e.g., Fodor & Lepore, 2002; Klein & Murphy, 2001) posit that they do (...) not — merely describing differing patterns of usage — while others (e.g., Falkum & Vicente, 2015; Pietroski, 2018) argue that polysemes, but not homonyms, involve an underspecified representation that is neutral with respect to the form’s multiple senses. While some extant experimental evidence supports the latter view (Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008; Srinivasan, Berner, & Rabagliati, 2019), there has not yet been clear evidence of the representation of lexical ambiguity affecting domain-general reasoning. Using a novel inference paradigm, we compare participants’ dispositions to endorse deductive, Aristotelian arguments with equivocating polysemes versus comparable arguments with equivocating homonyms. We find that participants endorse the former substantially more than the latter, a phenomenon that we dub the "Uncommon Sense Effect". Our results provide direct evidence that polysemes and homonyms have underlyingly distinct mental representations — in particular that polysemes uniquely invoke an underspecified representation that allows for rule-based inferences across distinct senses. (shrink)

Recent philosophical literature on pain has seen much discussion of puzzles which directly relate to how we ordinarily talk and think about pain. Using tools from theoretical and experimental linguistics, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of two types of locution about pain: predicative locutions (e.g. ‘My leg is hurting’, ‘I am hurting’), and locative locutions (e.g. ‘There is a pain in my leg’). Focusing on the paradox of pain and the pain-in-mouth puzzle, the paper shows that polysemy plays (...) an important role in how we should diagnose these puzzles. The discussion here serves to illustrate that philosophical debates often go wrong because they ignore the fact that the terms under discussion are polysemous. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have discussed conjunction reduction and other tests for polysemy/homonymy with reference to the potential ambiguity of certain expressions central to various philosophical debates. However, it has been argued that the conjunction reduction tests are not decisive in settling such matters, because some polysemous terms are acceptable under conjunction reduction. For example, conjunctions involving polysemous book and lunch can be reduced: The book is heavy and interesting and Lunch was delicious but took forever. Against this contention, the (...) paper argues that polysemy does not undermine ambiguity tests. Terms that are acceptable in copredicational contexts in some or even in many cases also generate zeugma in other cases. We also argue, however, that conjunction reduction and similar tests have holes: monosemous terms can also give rise to zeugmatic readings. We analyze two classes of verb as potential examples. (shrink)

Many word forms in natural language are polysemous, but only some of them allow for co-predication, that is, they allow for simultaneous predications selecting for two different meanings or senses of a nominal in a sentence. In this paper, we try to explain (i) why some groups of senses allow co-predication and others do not, and (ii) how we interpret co-predicative sentences. The paper focuses on those groups of senses that allow co-predication in an especially robust and stable way. We (...) argue, using these cases, but focusing particularly on the multiply polysemous word ‘school’, that the senses involved in co-predication form especially robust activation packages, which allow hearers and readers to access all the different senses in interpretation. (shrink)

Reclamation of a slur involves the creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, (...) therefore, that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. One generalization that follows from my account is that conventionalized verbal irony, unlike conventionalized metonymy and metaphor, begets homonymy. Along the way, I criticize the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in terms of semantic and etymological relatedness. If the notions of polysemy and homonymy are to be invoked in explanations, they should be understood in terms of how meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. My account also provides an elegant way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration. (shrink)

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. -/- These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common type of ambiguity, and one (...) that is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. -/- We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought. (shrink)

Motivation und Ikonizität : Die Frage nach dem richtigen Wort -- Der Zusammenhang von Polysemie, Ikonizität und lexikalischer Motivation -- Empirische Ermittlung lexikalischer Motivation : Die Frage nach der richtigen Methode -- Der Einfluss konzeptueller Relationen auf intrinsische und extrinsische Motivierbarkeit -- Polysemie und Skalen diagrammatischer Transparenz : Ein formales und semantisches Transparenzmodell -- Zusammenfassung und Schlussbemerkungen.

Polysemy is a phenomenon involving single lexical items with multiple related senses. Much theorizing about it has focused on developing linguistic accounts that are responsive to various compositional and representational challenges in semantics and psychology. We focus on an underexplored question: Why does systematic polysemy cluster in the ways it does? That is, why do we see certain regular patterns of sense multiplicity, but not others? Drawing on an independently motivated view of kind cognition – i.e. the formal (...) structures for different classes of kind representations – we argue for an answer centered on conceptual individuation. Specifically, we argue that classes of kind concepts vary in what they individuate (i.e. counting as one and specifying what makes it the same or different from others). By elucidating these differences, we can explain why a range of patterns of systematic polysemy are found cross-linguistically and why other patterns are not attested. Overall, our account provides an explanatory framework addressing an important question at the interface between language and mind and opens new avenues for future theoretical and empirical research. (shrink)

Proper names are usually considered devices of singular reference but, when considered as word-types, they also exhibit other kinds of uses. In this paper I intend to show that systematic kinds of uses of proper names considered as word-types can be accounted for by a generalized rule-based conception of systematic polysemy, one which not only postulates a multiplicity of stable senses for an expression, but also a multiplicity of content generating rules, each of which determines potentially different contents in (...) different contexts. In contrast to the currently extant polysemous conceptions of proper names (Leckie in Philos Stud 165:1139–1160, 2013), which only encompass individual and predicative uses, the presented proposal concerns all systematic uses of proper names considered in the literature, i.e., individual, predicative, deferred, descriptive, anaphoric, and bound uses of proper names. The resulting conception accommodates referential intuition about the default individual uses of proper names while also admitting other kinds of uses without generating homonymy. It transpires that proper names are semantically underdetermined and context-sensitive expressions. (shrink)

The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, particularly (...) that produced in discussions of “underspecification” and “overspecification,” does not undermine this view nor support the pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

In both natural language and biology, signs are polysemous, with a range of possible meanings before interaction-in-context determines their value. What is the meaning of polysemy? What is the role of polysemy in linguistic and biological systems? In this paper, I present the idea that organisms function by using two di¤erent, orthogonal modes of communication: digital (involving discrete units) and analogue (involving continuous values). I argue that the polysemy of the sign, here metaphorically interpreted as a ‘superposition,’ (...) is necessary for orchestrating these modes and tying them to a concrete context of interaction. (shrink)

The phenomenon of systematic polysemy offers a fruitful domain for examining the theoretical differences between lexicological and lexicographic approaches to description. We consider here the process that provides for systematic conversion of count to mass nouns in English (a chicken Æ chicken, an oak Æ oak etc.). From the point of view of lexicology, we argue, standard syntactic and pragmatic tests suggest the phenomenon should be described by means of a single unindividuated transfer function that does not distinguish between (...) interpretations (rabbit = "meat" vs. "fur"). From the point of view of lexicography, however, these pragmatically determined"sense precisions" are made part of explicit description via the inclusion of semantic "licenses," a mechanism distinct from lexical rules. (shrink)

Some philosophers assume that our ordinary parts-whole concepts are intuitive and univocal. Moreover, some assume that mereology—the formal theory of parts-whole relations—adequately captures these intuitive and univocal notions. Lewis, for example, maintains that mereology is “perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain.” Following his lead, many assume that expressions such as ‘is part of’ are univocal, topic-neutral, and that compositional monism is true. This paper explores the rejection of –. I argue that our ordinary parts-whole expressions are polysemous; they have multiple distinct, (...) but related, interpretations or meanings. I canvass several criteria by which to test for polysemy, and apply these criteria to some of our parts-whole terminology. I also examine some philosophical examples involving abstracta and abstract parts, which give us additional reasons to think that our parts-whole expressions are polysemous and topic-specific. Yet if so, then compositional pluralism is true. (shrink)

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus (...) non‐metaphorical word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings. (shrink)

We think of "secularization" as a process that can occur anywhere. And we think of secularist regimes as options for any country, whether they are adopted or not. And certainly, these words crop up everywhere. But do they really mean the same thing? Are there not, rather, subtle differences, which can bedevil cross-cultural discussions of these matters? This paper explores the important historical polysemy found in the evolution of the term "secular.".

Monuments commemorating racists are theoretically and practically controversial. Just what these monuments represent is interpreted, in part, on grounds of identity. Since the public nature of such monuments renders them polysemous, ways of reasonably thinking about the relevant identity-based claims are needed. A distinction between an individualistic, psychological notion of identity and an interpersonal, way-of-living notion of identity is drawn. The former notion is illegitimate as a basis of claims about how to interpret public symbols, but the latter notion is (...) conceptually defensible and politically admissible. Use of ways of living to frame discourse about identity and racist monuments generates four sorts of question. These questions raise issues that are respectively a) internal to particular ways of living, b) pertinent to relations between particular ways of living, or c) objective with regard to ways of living, or d) the product of political discussion among ways of living. Such examples as the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia and the (now-removed) statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Victoria, British Columbia are examined to show how polysemy can be recognized and navigated by focusing on ways of living rather than on narrowly psychological aspects of identity. Although in principle both preservationist and removalist positions can be defensible with regard to particular statues, there is reason to think that a general removalist position is prima facie attractive. (shrink)

Cases of copredication like `The book was long but boring' are marshaled against externalist theories of meaning, alleging that the rampant polysemy of natural language expressions resists externalist explanations. Various externalist responses deny the claimed polysemy, appealing to the role of speaker intuitions about reference in arguments that mobilize copredication data against externalism. I argue that these denialist strategies fail because they miss the import of arguments from copredication, which point to natural language speakers’ inferences, not intuitions about (...) reference. (shrink)

Theorists have recently defended rival analyses of sound. The leading analyses reduce sound to sensations or mental representations, longitudinal compression waves, or sounding objects or events. Participants in the debate presuppose that because the features of the world targeted by these reductive strategies are distinct, at most one of the analyses is correct. In this article I argue that this presupposition is mistaken, endorsing a polysemy analysis of ‘sound’. Thus the ‘What is sound?’ debate is largely merely verbal, or (...) so I argue. All participants in this debate agree that there are the various reductions, they simply differ over which of them ‘is sound’. Yet there is no reason to think that, say, psychologists studying auditory sensations/representations, audio physicists studying sound waves, and anthropologists/ethnomusicologists studying sounding objects/events aren’t just studying different reductions of ‘sound’ despite the different explananda of their research. According to the polysemy theory of sound, we do not need to uniquely identify sound with one of these various explananda, outside of some context. (shrink)

This paper critiques the biological race realism of Quayshawn Spencer. Spencer's recent embrace of “radical race pluralism” (RRP) is welcome but incomplete, because it needs methods that distinguish different communicative contexts for how American English speakers use “race” and related terms. I offer a pragmatic approach to identifying such contexts that combines pragmatic argumentation theory, rhetorical polysemy, and a pragmatic approach to definition. One consequence of embracing RRP is that Spencer's theory of “OMB race talk” is unsupportable because it (...) collapses three distinct communicative contexts: genomic research, legal and regulatory governance, and ordinary talk. By so doing, OMB race talk blocks attempts to fight racism and violates ethical standards that should allow people the agency to define their own identities. (shrink)

The network model of polysemy is much discussed in linguistics but not in philosophy. Conversely, much ink has been spilt on semantic externalism in philosophy, while the topic evokes little interest in linguistics. This chapter demonstrates that the network model of polysemy represents a potential threat to semantic externalism and proposes to adopt the repetition-based conception of linguistic expression to find a middle ground. Words are defined in terms of repetition, which comprises both modulation and cognate relationships. Insofar (...) as the speaker has the ability to modulate senses, the meaning of the term ‘water’ can be considered a function of the intrinsic properties of the speaker. Oscar’s and Toscar’s identical intrinsic properties determine the identical polysemous meaning of ‘water’, i.e. Oscar’s and Toscar’s mental lexicons contain essentially the same polysemy network. Nevertheless, they know distinct words, because their utterances of ‘water’ are not linked by any relation of repetition. Even though Oscar’s ‘water’ and Toscar’s ‘water’ are synonyms, they are still not cognates. This shows that the content of one’s mental lexicon constitutively depends upon one’s external environment. Although Oscar and Toscar can, if put in the same situation, mean the same thing by using the same words, they do not know whether the words they store in their lexicons are identical or not. Semantic externalism should give way to lexical externalism. (shrink)

Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other part-of-speech categories. Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast (...) growth till the 31st month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition. Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from a combination of a standalone bias for low polysemy and a preference for nouns. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Viebahn (Pac Philos Q 99:749–762, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.1222) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular (...) class='Hi'>polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis. (shrink)

Polysemy seems to be a relatively neglected phenomenon within philosophy of language as well as in many quarters in linguistic semantics. Not all variations in a word’s contribution to truth-conditional contents are to be thought as expressions of the phenomenon of polysemy, but it can be argued that many are. Polysemous terms are said to contribute senses or aspects to truth-conditional contents. In this paper, I will make use of the notion of aspect to argue that some apparently (...) wild variations in an utterance’s truth conditions are instead quite systematic. In particular, I will focus on Travis’ much debated green leaves case and explain it in terms of the polysemy of the noun; and in particular, in terms of the as-it-is and the as-it-looks aspects associated with kind words. (shrink)

Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world's languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual languages (...) is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular 'map' of interrelated cognitive categories. (shrink)

For the communication between people to remain effective and lively and for the expressive power to be permanent, the qualities of the words are as important as the quantity of words in a language. From this perspective, Arabic has many linguistic features like other developed languages. Parsing, deriviations, blending, synonymy, contrast, arabization, antithetical polysemy, commutation, ellipsis, polysemy, etc. Language features are intensely found in Arabic. As it is known, polysemy is one of the important issues of the (...) Arabic language that has been taken into consideration since the compilation period. Although there are scholars among Arabic linguists who deny the existence of polysemous words, the vast majority have accepted the issue of polysemy. Among polysemous words, some words indicate several different meanings, as well as words that express many different meanings. In this respect, words that indicate a lot of meanings in the group of polysemous words have attracted the attention of poets. Poets wrote long odes using such words to demonstrate their mastery of the science of the dictionary and to prove their competence in the art of poetry. There are even poets who write different odes in terms of theme, using the same word. One of these poets is Ibn al-Munāṣıf from Cordoba, who lived between 1168 and 1223. The poet, better known as the jurist, wrote his famous ode using the common word "acuz". By ending each couplet with the word ʾujūz, the poet brought together the different meanings of the word ʾujūz in the ode in question. In this study, the issue of polysemy, which is considered an important feature of the Arabic language, will be briefly discussed. In addition, the Qasida of ʾUjūz will be translated and analyzed. (shrink)

BackgroundEnhancement involves the use of biomedical technologies to improve human capacities beyond therapeutic purposes. It has been well documented that enhancement is sometimes difficult to distinguish from treatment. As a subtype of enhancement, neuroenhancement aims to improve one’s cognitive or emotional capacities.Main bodyThis article proposes that the notion of neuroenhancement deserves special attention among enhancements in general, because apart from the notion of treatment, it also overlaps with other concepts such as prevention, pain relief, and pleasure seeking. Regarding prevention, patients’ (...) mental endurance can be enhanced when a patient is prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for the purpose of preventing the relapse of depression following a stressful situation. As for pain relief, psychiatrists use medication to alleviate distress in patients who experience various types of anxiety; the alleviation of distress is equal to psychological pain relief, but is also an enhancement of the patient’s temperamental traits. Regarding pleasure seeking, insidious transition exists between neuroenhancement and pleasure seeking when using psychotropic drugs. It is well known that people use psychostimulants for recreational purposes and to induce overconfidence in one’s performance. The polysemy of psychotropics derives from their effects on human sensibility. Therefore, when using psychotropic agents, psychiatrists should pay close attention to what the agent is used for on each patient in each situation, and explicitly share the continuity and overlap in the purpose of prescribing a medication with the patients to make a better clinical decision.ConclusionsThe notion of neuroenhancement overlaps not only with the notion of treatment, but also with other concepts of prevention, pain relief, and pleasure seeking. The continuity between those concepts makes the issues concerning the prescription of psychotropic drugs subtler. Psychiatrists should explicitly share the continuity with the patients to make a better clinical decision. (shrink)

This study explores the relationship between polysemy, frequency, and register-specific meaning in English legal adjectives and develops a pedagogical framework for teaching these items to learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Drawing on a mixed quantitative–qualitative design, polysemous legal adjectives were identified from _Black’s Law Dictionary_ and examined for their frequency in a large English corpus of parliamentary discourse and sense overlap in Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. Statistical tests assessed correlations between frequency, number of senses, and semantic overlap (...) with general English, while qualitative semantic analysis traced the development of legal-specific meanings from their general-language prototypes. Findings indicate that higher-frequency adjectives typically display broader polysemy and greater overlap with general English, whereas low-frequency items more often exhibit legal-exclusive senses. These results inform a hybrid pedagogical model that combines inductive discovery, structured sequencing, and corpus-based tasks to help EFL learners manage semantic extensions and avoid negative transfer. The study underscores the value of frequency-sensitive, context-driven instruction for fostering semantic flexibility and professional accuracy in legal English. (shrink)

The regular use of a polysemous expression with a certain meaning is typically a semantic phenomenon not a pragmatic one: absent novel spur-of-the-moment modifications or implicatures, the polyseme typically contributes one of its encoded meanings, selected in context, to the message of an utterance. Many examples of polysemy are discussed, including regular polysemy. It is argued that some popular alleged examples of regular polysemy – for example, ‘book’, ‘city’ – involve a mistaken metaphysics and should be dismissed. (...) Other issues discussed include “underspecified” monosomy, co-composition, and generalized conversational implicature. After doing some preliminary work to help bring the psycholinguistic discussion to bear on the SEM-PRAG issue, I defend SEM from objections, including some from psycholinguistics and one from the phenomenon of “copredication”.The contrary view of polysemous phenomena, PRAG, is that a pragmatic modification of meaning typically plays a role in constituting messages. This generates a “psychological-reality requirement”: pragmatic explanation is committed to there being regular subconscious psychological processes in speakers and hearers that are appropriately different from the standard convention-exploiting ones, whatever they may be, involved in the use of ambiguous terms. I offer Occamist, Developmental, and Abstract-Core Objections to PRAG which place a heavy evidential burden on PRAG. I argue that the evidence on linguistic processes provided by psycholinguistics does not come close to fulfilling that burden. At this point there seems to be no evidence from the study of the mind that counts significantly against the evidence from behavioral regularities for the SEM view of polysemy. (shrink)

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6–12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, (...) or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses. (shrink)

Alethic pluralism is the view that there are many ways for truth-bearers to be true since different properties realise truth in different domains. Thus, especially in its strong version, pluralism amounts to the claim that the notion of truth we ordinarily employ is actually directly linked with a plurality of realizer properties. At the same time, this conceptual unity is normally taken to be mirrored at the linguistic level by the existence of a single truth predicate “true”. However, although much (...) has been said about the relation between the concept of truth and its realizers, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the meaning of the natural language predicate “true”. In this paper I intend to present and argue for a compositional polysemic model of the truth predicate, claiming that this framework constitutes the best account of “true” once a strong pluralist metaphysical picture is endorsed. In the text, I will present the details of this polysemy account and its differences from other existing proposal. Then, I will argue against some constant and context-sensitive alternatives. I will conclude that a polysemic account of "true" better fits a strongly plural conception of truth. (shrink)

The transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017), is at the heart of the remarkable recent progress in the development of language models, including widely-used chatbots such as Chat-GPT and Claude. In this paper, I argue that we can extract from the way the transformer architecture works a theory of the relationship between context and meaning. I call this the transformer theory, and I argue that it is novel with regard to two related philosophical debates: the contextualism debate regarding (...) the extent of context-sensitivity across natural language, and the polysemy debate regarding how polysemy should be captured within an account of word meaning. (shrink)

This paper concerns the topic of slur reclamation. I start with presenting two seemingly opposing accounts of slur reclamation, Jeshion’s (2020) Polysemy view and Bianchi’s (2014) Echoic view. Then, using the data provided by linguists, I discuss the histories of the reclamation of the slur ‘queer’ and of the n-word, which bring me to presenting a view of reclamation that combines the Polysemy view and Echoic view. The Combined view of slur reclamation proposed in this paper postulates meaning (...) change while fleshing out the prag-matic mechanisms necessary for it to occur. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that that polysemy is a two-sided phenomenon. It can be reduced neither to pragmatic modulation nor to ambiguity, for it is a mixture of both. The senses of a polysemous expression result from pragmatic modulation but they are stored in memory, as the senses of an ambiguous expression are. The difference with straightforward ambiguity is that the modulation relations between the senses are transparent to the language users: the senses are felt as related – (...) they form a family of senses. In other words, whereas two homonymous expressions are different expressions, with the same phonological realization but distinct meanings, a polyseme is a single expression, i.e. a semantic as well as a phonological unit. It has one meaning, which should not be confused with the separate senses which it contributes in context. Different ways of thinking of that unitary meaning will be discussed, and consequences drawn for the debate between more or less radical versions of Contextualism. (shrink)

Recent research in psycholinguistics suggests that language processing frequently involves mental imagery. This paper focuses on visual imagery and discusses two issues regarding the processing of polysemous words (i.e. words with multiple related meanings or senses) – co-predication and sense-relatedness. It aims to show how mental imagery can illuminate these two issues.

The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical architecture of semantic atomism and its consequences with respect to natural language. In particular, it looks to explore the notion of possible concepts using the fundamental distinction between simple and complex concepts and expressions in Jerry Fodor’s atomism. The distinction is exploited to produce an unusual type of concept referred to as a correlate, which effectively mirrors complex concepts while maintaining a distinct underlying structure. Though harmless in and of themselves, (...) their presence in the context of polymorphemic expressions suggests that atomism harbors a tacit and unintuitive form of polysemy that is problematic in its own right and that leads to other complications, some of which may be demonstrated on the example of communication. These issues are tied to the way atomism is structured, and although they seem to have gone largely unnoticed, they appear to bear negatively on the adequacy of atomism where natural language is concerned. (shrink)

The paradox of pain refers to the idea that the folk concept of pain is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily states. By taking a close look at our pain terms, this paper argues that there is no paradox of pain. The air of paradox dissolves once we recognize that pain terms are polysemous and that there are two separate but related concepts of pain rather than one.