Divergence of meaning. Meaning and polysemy

While dealing with a componential analysis of meaning, one would expect all the semantic components (аs +HUMAN, +MALE and +ADULT in man) to be equally important. In actual speech, however, this is not so, as some of the components may be reduced in importance, and even fully neutralized, when the word is used in some specific contexts (as +MALE is neutralized if man is a morpheme in mankind). This is especially so if the semantic components in question are not equally important in defining the meaning of a word. These features of a word’s semantic structure make it possible to use it in various contexts, and with various meanings. Such words are known as polysemantic, and the corresponding phenomenon is known as polysemy.

Due to the monosyllabic character of English words, and predominance of root words (unlike Russian, where most words are derived), polysemy is very typical of English words. There is a direct proportion between the relative frequency of a word usage in English, and the number of variations that make up its semantic structure; i.e. themore frequent an English word is, the more polysemantic it is. It is not unusual for an English word (like the adjective good or the verb set) to have about a hundred of distinct meanings, and the average number of meanings for a word in the first thousand of the most frequent words is 25.

Consider the verb run. Its main meaning seems to be " to go by moving legs quickly" – although this should be further distinguished from jogging or trotting, – and is restricted to humans, and possibly animals. If we extend it to inanimate thing (A bus runs between these two villages twice a day), or use it аs a metaphor (It made my blood run cold), both " on foot", and possibly also " quickly", are neutralized or suppressed. In The car runs on petrol, the idea of motion isreduced to " operating" or " functioning", and this is reflected in the changed syntactic valency, or environment, of the word. In Thisshop is run by Mrs Brown but owned by her husband, the idea of " operation" is narrowed down to " management", and in The river bank ran up steeply, there is no implication of speed or movement, but the seme of direction is preserved. In the final analysis, there seems to be no single semantic component common to all the variant meanings – known as lexico-semantic variants – of the verb run. On the other hand, every variant has something in common with at least one of the others. This is best represented schematically by a branching tree diagram which shows the interrelation between all the variant meanings.

There are no universally accepted criteria for differentiating variant meanings of a word. In fact, different dictionaries may group variant meanings differently. To be able to distinguish between variant meanings, or lexico-grammatical variants of a single word, we must note the morphological peculiarities (if any) of each variant, the difference in paradigm or distribution (i.e. possible contexts), difference in valency, different syntactic functions (e.g. run istransitive in some meanings but intransitive in others).

All the lexical and lexico-grammatical variants of a word taken together form its semantic structure, or semantic paradigm. A more detailed analysis of this structure presents considerable difficulty, but there is a set of generally recognized oppositions with respect to meaning.

To begin with, meaning can be direct and figurative. It is direct if an object so named could be recognized outside of any context, even from a word standing in isolation. It is figurative when an object is both named and characterized through its similarity or connection with another object (which isusually impossible without a context).

Other oppositions are more or less self-evident, including concrete/abstract; primary or main/secondary; central/marginal or peripheral; narrow/extended; general/special etc. For example, screen is direct when meaning a piece of furniture or a projection surface, and figurative when meaning something that protects by hiding (a smoke screen). In its turn, the projection surface comes secondary to a piece of furniture, as the latter meaning was the earliest historically (even though the projection surface seems to be the most typical meaning of screen in modern contexts). In a screen adaptation, screen means " having to do with cinema" and is therefore abstract, while the previously defined meanings are concrete, and the main meaning is the one possessing the highest frequency of usage at any given period.

The above oppositions are synchronic in character. If, however, we are interested in the diachronic aspect, we would distinguish the etymological, or the earliest known meaning; the archaic meanings, no longer active, but still surviving in restricted contexts (аз idioms or compound words); obsolete meanings, no longer in use; the present-day meaning and probably also the original meaning serving as a basis for derivation.

If the stress is not on the meaning of the word, but rather upon its use in various contexts, the stylistic classification of words may be useful, separating words into neutral, bookish and colloquial, with a number of subclasses in each.

Polysemy is a phenomenon of language, not of speech. It deals with those meanings of a word that are firmly established in the language through their repeated use, and could be isolated from texts and fixed in dictionaries. However, a word used in a particular context may represent an unusual meaning, often suggested by an untypical environment, often figurative or transferred (as one is terminated, rather than killed, in certain works of science fiction). Such meanings are known as contextual, are created by individual authors or speakers, and hardly ever acquire a permanent status in a language. The extreme case of a contextual meaning isa nonce-use, coined for a unique use in a unique context, and never meant to be reproduced (as Lewis Carroll’s un-birthday present).

Summing up, we define the semantic structure of a word as a structured set of interrelated lexical variants with different denotational meanings. All the variants are expressed by the same set of morphemes, but occur in different contextual environments. The lexical variants are interrelated due to the existence of some common semantic component, and the various meanings they express have a recurrent character. They may also have various emotional, stylistic and other conno­tations, but these are optional. Every meaning is thus characterized according to its function, its significative effect and its pragmatic effect it has to fulfil in referring the word to extra-linguistic reality and to the speaker. It can also be characterized with respect to other meanings with which it is contrasted.