Polysemy and the lexicon
Compromise #1: Going half-way
As much polysemy as necessary
Polysemy would have to be recognized just in case the special properties of a word’s use cannot be predicted from associated words, from general background knowledge, or from general principles of polysemization. For example, one use of the preposition round is to designate a path defined by the perimeter of a landmark entity, as when you “walk round the lake”, “swim round the lake”, “sail round the island”, and such like. To “go round the guests” would mean, then, to trace a path defined by the perimeter of a group of assembled guests. But the expression would most likely refer to a situation in which the trajector traces a random path amongst the guests, going from one guest to another. This special “random path” sense cannot plausibly be derived, by any process of conceptual elaboration, from the perimeter-following sense; it would need to be separately listed.
Sometimes, a word fails to participate in what is otherwise a productive polysemization process. We can readily use museum, school, and university to refer both to the institutions and to the buildings which house them. The same, however, does not apply to government and parliament. These words may refer to the institutions, and to the people who work in them, but they cannot readily refer to the buildings which house them: ?The parliament was built in 1980, ?The government burnt down. (In these cases, we should probably specify the entity explicitly as the government building, or the parliament building.2) Likewise, polysemy between the path sense of a preposition and the use designating the end-point of a path is not fully productive. You can “walk towards the back of the room” (path) and “stand towards to the back of the room” (place as end-point of a fictitious path). But while you can “walk towards the sea” or “drive towards the mountains”, but it would be odd to say of someone that they “live towards the sea”, or “live towards the mountains”.3
These latter cases would be particularly problematic for attempts to systemically regulate the incidence of polysemy. They concern, not so much the availability of different senses on the basis of general polysemization processes, but the non-occurrence of otherwise expected senses. To the extent that the different senses of museum, etc., are predictable from general processes at work in English, we could reduce the amount of polysemy in the lexicon by not separately listing the different senses. But in the case of government and parliament, we would need to flag these words as not undergoing the polysemization process. Paradoxically, the words with fewer different uses would need a more complex representation than the ones which undergo regular polysemization. But even flagging a word as an “exception” might not be fully adequate in the case of towards. It is not that towards does not allow the “place as end-point” reading; what are odd, are some specific examples which invoke this reading, such as its occurrence with live in connection with a geophysical landmark.
2. René Dirven (personal communication) has suggested that government and parliament behave differently from museum, university, etc., because they focus on the “body politic” rather than on the institutions per se.
3. A Google search (April 14, 2006) conformed these intuitions. The phrase stand towards the back scored 213 hits (alongside 410 hits for stand toward the back), as against no hits for live toward(s) the sea/mountains.
