Search

SYSTEMATIC POLYSEMY AND CO-PREDICATION The author of the article discusses the polysemy of nouns, distinguishing polysemy motivated by metonymy (called here derivative polysemy), and so-called logical polysemy in which the meanings are so strictly related to each other that one has to perceive them as a part of a complex meaning or a global notional unit. The author discusses the concepts of J. Pustejovsky and A. Cruse, focusing on the polysemy of units meaning institutions. In order to analyse them, the author of the article uses the co-predication test aiming at checking language ambiguity. In the conclusion, she attempts to explain the fortuitousness of the co-predication test in the indicated group of units, changed as compared to the discussed theoretical approaches. Various readings of the words in question are treated as aspects of the general notional structure of one lexical unit (quasi-polysemic aspects) that are more or less linguistically fixed and depend of one’s knowledge of the world which enables combined conceptualization of all the aspects.

The author of the article discusses the polysemy of nouns, distinguishing polysemy motivated by metonymy (called here derivative polysemy), and so-called logical polysemy in which the meanings are so strictly related to each other that one has to perceive them as a part of a complex meaning or a global notional unit. The author discusses the concepts of J. Pustejovsky and A. Cruse, focusing on the polysemy of units meaning institutions. In order to analyse them, the author of the article uses the co-predication test aiming at checking language ambiguity. In the conclusion, she attempts to explain the fortuitousness of the co-predication test in the indicated group of units, changed as compared to the discussed theoretical approaches. Various readings of the words in question are treated as aspects of the general notional structure of one lexical unit (quasi-polysemic aspects) that are more or less linguistically fixed and depend of one's knowledge of the world which enables combined conceptualization of all the aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates an issue at the interface between language and ontology. It is argued that the phenomenon of 'inherent polysemy' observed in lexical semantics for nouns such as book or country actually is a deeper phenomenon grounded on specific ontological relations involving the entities referred to. It is shown that this phenomenon emerges not only in language but also in most available ontologies. Beyond the 'dot types' used in some linguistic theories to account for logical polysemy, it is proposed to introduce 'complex categories' in ontologies in order to solve incoherence and inconsistency issues appearing when this phenomenon is not acknowledged and to characterize complex categories on the basis of formal ontology relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]