THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF POLYSEMANTIC WORDS

Polysemy is characteristic of most words in many languages, however different they may be. But it is more characteristic of the English

¹ There is a vast literature on the problems of denotation, connotation and implication that can be recommended as background reading. These are works by E.S. Aznaurova, M.V. Nikitin, I.V. Arnold, I.P. Sternin, V.I. Shakhovsky and others. The references are given in full at the end of the book.

vocabulary as compared with Russian, due to the monosyllabic character of English and the predominance of root words. The greater the relative frequency of the word, the greater the number of variants that constitute its semantic structure, i.e. the more polysemantic it is. This regularity is of course a statistical, not a rigid one.¹

Word counts show that the total number of meanings separately registered in NED for the first thousand of the most frequent English words is almost 25,000, i.e. the average number of meanings for each of these most frequent words is 25.

Consider some of the variants of a very frequent, and consequently polysemantic word run. We define the main variant as ‘to go by moving the legs quickly’ as in: Tired as I was, I began to run frantically home. The lexical meaning does not change in the forms ran or running. The basic meaning may be extended to inanimate things: / caught the bus that runs between C and B; or the word run may be used figuratively: It makes the blood run cold. Both the components ‘on foot’ and ‘quickly’ are suppressed in these two last examples, as well as in The car runs on petrol. The idea of motion remains but it is reduced to ‘operate or function’. The difference of meaning is reflected in the difference of syntactic valency. It is impossible to use this variant about humans and say: *We humans run on food. The active-passive transformation is possible when the meaning implies ‘management’: The Co-op runs this self-service shop — This self-service shop is run by the Co-op, but */ was run by home is obviously nonsense.

The component ‘speed’ is important in the following:

Then though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run (Marvell).

There are other variants of run where there is no implication of speed or ‘on foot’ or motion of any kind but the seme of direction is retained: On the other side of the stream the bank ran up steeply. *The bank ran without the implication of direction is meaningless. There are also other variants of the verb run, they all have something in common with some of the others. To sum up; though there is no single semantic component common to all the lexico-semantic variants of the verb run, every variant has something in common with at least one of the others.

Every meaning in language and every difference in meaning is signalled either by the form of the word itself or by context, i.e. its syntagmatic relations depending on the position in the spoken chain. The unity of the two facets of a linguistic sign — its form and its content in the case of a polysemantic word — is kept in its lexico-grammatical variant.

No universally accepted criteria for differentiating these variants within one polysemantic word can so far be offered, although the problem has lately attracted a great deal of attention. The main points can be

¹ A special formula known as "Zipf’s Law" has been worked out to express the correlation between frequency, word length and polysemy.

summed up as follows: lexico-grammatical variants of a word are its variants characterized by paradigmatic or morphological peculiarities, different valency, different syntactic functions; very often they belong to different lexico-grammatical groups of the same part of speech. Thus run is intransitive in / ran home, but transitive in / run this office. Some of the variants demand an object naming some vehicle, or some adverbials of direction, and so on.

All the lexical and lexico-grammatical variants of a word taken together form its semantic structure or semantic paradigm. Thus, in the semantic structure of the word youth three lexico-grammatical variants may be distinguished: the first is an abstract uncountable noun, as in the friends of one’s youth, the second is a countable personal noun ‘a young man’ (plural youths) that can be substituted by the pronoun he in the singular and they in the plural; the third is a collective noun ‘young men and women’ having only one form, that of the singular, substituted by the pronoun they. Within the first lexico-grammatical variant two shades of meaning can be distinguished with two different referents, one denoting the state of being young, and the other the time of being young. These shades of meaning are recognized due to the lexical peculiarities of distribution and sometimes are blended together as in to feel that one’s youth has gone, where both the time and the state can be meant. These variants form a structured set because they are expressed by the same sound complex and are interrelated in meaning as they all contain the semantic component ‘young’ and can be explained by means of one another.

No general or complete scheme of types of lexical meaning as elements of a word’s semantic structure has so far been accepted by linguists. Linguistic literature abounds in various terms reflecting various points of view. The following terms may be found with different authors: the meaning is direct when it nominates the referent without the help of a context, in isolation, i.e. in one word sentences. The meaning is figurative when the object is named and at the same time characterized through its similarity with another object. Note the word characterized: it is meant to point out that when used figuratively a word, while naming an object simultaneously describes it.

Other oppositions are concrete:: abstract; main/ primary::secondary; central ::peripheric; narrow : : e x t e n d e d; general:: special/particular, and so on. One readily sees that in each of these the basis of classification is different, although there is one point they have in common. In each case the comparison takes place within the semantic structure of one word. They are characterized one against the other.

Take, for example, the noun screen. We find it in its direct meaning when it names a movable piece of furniture used to hide something or protect somebody, as in the case of fire-screen placed in front of a fireplace. The meaning is figurative when the word is applied to anything which protects by hiding, as in smoke screen. We define this meaning as figurative comparing it to the first that we called direct. Again, when by a screen the speaker means ‘a silver-coloured sheet on which

pictures are shown’, this meaning in comparison with the main/primary will be secondary. When the same word is used attributively in such combinations as screen actor, screen star, screen version, etc., it comes to mean ‘pertaining to the cinema’ and is abstract in comparison with the first meaning which is concrete. The main meaning is that which possesses the highest frequency at the present stage of vocabulary development. All these terms reflect relationships existing between different meanings of a word at the same period, so the classification may be called synchronic and paradigmatic, although the terms used are borrowed from historical lexicology and stylistics.¹

If the variants are classified not only by comparing them inside the semantic structure of the word but according to the style and sphere of language in which they may occur, if they have stylistic connotations, the classification is stylistic. All the words are classified into stylistically neutral and stylistically coloured. The latter may be classified into bookish and colloquial, bookish styles in their turn may be (a) general, (b) poetical, (c) scientific or learned, while colloquial styles are subdivided into (a) literary colloquial, (b) familiar colloquial, (c) slang.

If we are primarily interested in the historical perspective, the meanings will be classified according to their genetic characteristic and their growing or diminishing role in the language. In this way the following terms are used: etymological, i.e. the earliest known meaning; archaic, i.e. the meaning superseded at present by a newer one but still remaining in certain collocations; obsolete, gone out of use; present-day meaning, which is the one most frequent in the present-day language and the original meaning serving as basis for the derived ones. It is very important to pay attention to the fact that one and the same meaning can at once belong, in accordance with different points, to different groups. These features of meaning may therefore serve as distinctive features describing each meaning in its relationship to the others.

Diachronic and synchronic ties are thus closely interconnected as the new meanings are understood thanks to their motivation by the older meanings.

Hornby’s dictionary, for instance, distinguishes in the word witness four different variants, which may be described as follows.

witness₁ ‘evidence, testimony’ — a direct, abstract, primary meaning

witness₂ ‘a person who has first-hand knowledge of an event and is able to describe it’ — a metonymical, concrete, secondary meaning

witness₃ ‘a person who gives evidence under oath in a law court’ — a metonymical, concrete, secondary meaning specialized from witness₂

witness₄ ‘a person who puts his signature to a document by the side of that of the chief person who signs it’ — a metonymical, concrete, secondary meaning specialized from witness₂

¹ Some authors call relations within one word—epidigmatic. See p. 41.

Chapter 7

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 3005