Polysemy: Current Perspectives and Approaches

Polysemy is pervasive in natural languages, and affects both content and function words. While deciding which sense is intended on a given occasion of use rarely seems to cause any difficulty for speakers of a language, polysemy has proved notoriously difficult to treat both theoretically and empirically. Some of the questions that have occupied linguists, philosophers and psychologists interested in the phenomenon concern the representation of polysemous senses in the mental lexicon, how we should deal with polysemous words in a compositional theory of meaning, how novel senses of a word arise in the course of communication, and how hearers, usually effortlessly, arrive at the contextually appropriate sense on a given occasion of use.