From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Apr 11 2000 - 14:08:18 EDT
on 04/11/00 8:24 AM, Bill Ross wrote:
> I am not absolutely sure exactly what you were trying to say in your post.
Bill,
I use polysemy the way it was defined by some AI (artificial intelligence)
engineers working with semantic networks back in the mid-80's. Polysemy
refers to a case where a single instance of a single lexeme in a single
context can be instantiated with more than one sense. This also applies to
functional distributions. That is, a single instance of a single lexeme in a
single context can be instantiated with more than one semantic function.
I also apply this rule to grammatical functions but since that is outside of
the domain of semantics that is a different question.
>
> Are you saying that the semantic range of KOSMOS is somewhat "plastic" and
> can mean many things beyond the semantic range of the word
The way I understand the notion of "semantic domain" this question has no
meaning. We discover which semantic domains a given lexeme is a member of by
observation of the lexeme's distribution within a given corpus.
A lexeme can never be instantiated with a sense or a semantic function which
is "beyond the semantic range of the word." If you apply the bell curve to
semantic distributions of a common word like KOSMOS you will always find
some members outside the second and third standard deviations. This should
not cause us any consternation. But the issue of the bell curve is not
related to the issue of polysemy at all. It is a completely different
question.
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
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