Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches

This volume presents theoretical and computational work on polysemy, the term used in semantic analysis to describe words with more than one meaning or function. The contributors here consider the implications for grammatical theory and how they may be addressed by computational means.
This volume of commissioned essays examines 1990s theoretical and computational work on polysemy, the term used in semantic analysis to describe words with more than one meaning or function, sometime s perhaps related (as in plain) and sometimes perhaps not (as in bank). Such words present few difficulties in everyday language, but pose central problems for linguists and lexicographers, especially for those involved in lexical semantics and in computational modelling. The contributors to this book consider the implications of these problems for grammatical theory and how they may be addressed by computational means. The theoretical essays in the book examine polysemy as an aspect of a broader theory of word meaning. Three theoretical approaches are presented: the classical (or Aristotelian), the prototypical, and the relational. Their authors describe the nature of polysemy, the criteria for detecting it, and its manifestations across languages.