Polysemy

Polysemy is a property of single lexemes, which is characteristic of most lexemes in English. For example, the noun ‘neck’ is treated in standard English dictionaries as a single lexeme with several distinguishable senses: “part of the body”, “part of bottle”, “part of a shirt or other garment”, etc. The lexeme ‘neck’ is thus polysemous.

According to Leech (1974: 228), polysemy (one word having two or more senses) is recognized if the senses concerned are related in two ways: historically and psychologically, which do not necessarily coincide. Two senses are historically related: they are traced back from the same source or one sense is derived from the other; and two senses are psychologically related: they are intuitively felt to be related, and are assumed to be “different uses of the same word” by present-day users of the language. These are the two criteria used to distinguish polysemy from homonymy – the case where two or more words have the same pronunciation and / or spelling. The polisemous lexeme ‘head’ has related senses denoting the head of a person, the head of a company, head of a table, a head of a lettuce, etc whereas the lexeme ‘bank’ with its sense of “a business establishment in which money is kept for saving or commercial purposes or is invested, supplied for loans, or exchanged” is homonymous with the lexeme with the same pronunciation and spelling but unrelated sense of “the slope of land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel”.

Palmer (1981: 102) and Lyons (1981: 147) discuss the two criteria of etymology and the relatedness of meaning. The lexicographers base on etymology to decide the case of polysemy or homonymy. Identical forms having one origin are treated as polysemous and given a single entry in the dictionary. By contrast, identical forms having different origins are treated as homonymous and given separated entries in the dictionary. Thus, ‘head’ is given one entry and ‘bank’ two entries.

4/Morphological structure of a word. Immediate constituents’ analysis.

A morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous..

According to the role they play in constructing words, morphemes are subdivided into roots and affixes. The latter are further sub­divided, according to their position, into prefixes, suffixes and infixes, and according to their function and meaning, into derivational and functional affixes, the latter also called endings or outer formative s.

When a derivational or functional affix is stripped from the word, what remains is a stem (or astern base). The stem expresses the lexical and the part of speech meaning. For the word hearty and for the paradigm heart (sing.) — hearts (pi.)1 the stem may be represented as heart-. This stem is a single morpheme, it contains nothing but the root, so it is a simple stem. It is also a free stem because it is homonymous to the word heart.

Morphemes that can stand alone to function as words are called free morphemes. They comprise simple words (i.e. words made up of one free morpheme) and compound words (i.e. words made up of two free morphemes).

Examples:

Simple words: the, run, on, well

Compound words: keyboard, greenhouse, bloodshed, smartphone

Morphemes that can only be attached to another part of a word (cannot stand alone) are called bound morphemes.

Examples: