LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH: A STUDY OF POLYSEMY AND HOMONYMY
Keywords:
lexical semantics, polysemy, homonymy, word meaning, semantic analysis, English vocabulary, lexical ambiguity, lexicography, language comprehension, word sense disambiguationAbstract
This study explores the key aspects of lexical semantics in contemporary English with a focus on polysemy and homonymy. Lexical semantics, a subfield of linguistic semantics, investigates how word meanings are structured and interpreted within linguistic systems. Polysemy, where a single word has multiple related meanings, and homonymy, where a single form represents two or more unrelated meanings, are central phenomena in this area. The paper analyzes selected examples from modern English usage to demonstrate how these semantic categories influence language comprehension, lexical organization, and word sense disambiguation. Furthermore, the study highlights the implications of polysemy and homonymy in lexicography, language teaching, and natural language processing. Findings suggest that a clear distinction and understanding of these phenomena can enhance semantic analysis and improve language-related technologies and pedagogy.
References
Brinton, L. J., & Brinton, D. M. (2019). The linguistic structure of Modern English (3rd ed.). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Geeraerts, D., & Cuyckens, H. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Glynn, D., & Robinson, J. A. (Eds.). (2016). Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy. John Benjamins Publishing.
Klepousniotou, E., Titone, D., & Romero, C. (2017). Ambiguity in context: Distinguishing polysemy and homonymy using behavioral and neuroimaging evidence. Cognitive Science, 41(7), 1870–1901. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12438
Murphy, M. L. (2016). Lexical meaning. Cambridge University Press.
Rakhilina, E., & Reznikova, T. (2020). Polysemy and the lexicon: Cognitive and typological perspectives. Cognitive Linguistics, 31(2), 203–232. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0025
Riemer, N. (2020). Introducing semantics (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Schlechtweg, D., Hätty, A., & Schulte im Walde, S. (2021). A framework for evaluating meaning change computation. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9, 571–585. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00391
Xu, Y., & Kemp, C. (2015). Modeling polysemy: A probabilistic framework for word sense disambiguation. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 1412–1422. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D15-1168
Zhang, Y., & Liu, H. (2018). Distinguishing polysemy from homonymy in English lexicon using corpus data. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 23(4), 453–475. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16078.zha
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
