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Polysemy (/ pəˈlɪsɪmi / or / ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi /; [1][2] from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) 'many' and σῆμα (sêma) 'sign') is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a ...
Greek scholars contributed to the definition of metonymy. For example, Isocrates worked to define the difference between poetic language and non-poetic language by saying that, "Prose writers are handicapped in this regard because their discourse has to conform to the forms and terms used by the citizens and to those arguments which are precise ...
Semantic properties or meaning properties are those aspects of a linguistic unit, such as a morpheme, word, or sentence, that contribute to the meaning of that unit.Basic semantic properties include being meaningful or meaningless – for example, whether a given word is part of a language's lexicon with a generally understood meaning; polysemy, having multiple, typically related, meanings ...
However, polysemy means that the audience may create new meanings out of the text. The audience's perceived meanings may not be intended by the producers. Therefore, 'polysemy' and 'opposition' should be seen as two analytically distinct processes, although they do interconnect in the overall reading process.
Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach (from Ancient Greek: συν- "together" and χρόνος "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, often the present.
Lexical semantics. Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. [ 1 ][ 2 ] It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, [ 1 ] and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Word sense. In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows: We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.
Heterosemy contrasts with polysemy: while heterosemy implies two distinct words with the same form, polysemy implies one word with multiple meanings. For example, the word hard has the related meanings "solid" (as in a hard surface) and "difficult" (as in a hard question), but since the word is used as an adjective in both cases, it is an ...