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Corpus, the word take is included in the list of the 100 commonest English words used. In the content word categories, take is in the ninth position of the 25
commonest verbs in English. Those facts indicate that the word take will be encountered often in language teaching and learning. The findings of this research
can be an example of how to define the meanings of polysemous words that can be used in teaching and learning process.
F. Definition of Terms
This part provides the definition of terms related to the research. The definition of terms are words or phrases used in the research in order to clarify the
research concepts and avoid misinterpretation.
1. Polysemy
Napoli 1996; Akmaijan, Demers, Farmer, and Harnish 2001; and O’Grady and Archibald, 2010 define polysemy as a word which has the property
of having more than one related meanings. The multiple meanings or senses from polysemous words are related to the central meaning of the words. In this study,
polysemy is the phenomenon where a word has multiple meanings. A word like mouth is polysemous because there are several meanings that
can be derived from it, for example as ‘a part of face’ Jenna opens her mouth
widely and ‘an entrance to a place’ You can wait in the mouth of the cave. Both
meanings share a related sense of being an opening or the aperture of something.
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2. Homonymy
Homonymy is another case of meanings multiplicity that traditionally occurs as the contrast to polysemy. While polysemy is a word with several related
meanings, homonymy is two or more words sharing the same form but having different meanings. The same form of the words means having the same sound
and spelling but the meanings of homonyms are unrelated Jeffries, 1998. The word port is homonym that can have meanings as
‘a place where ships load and unload things
’ The ship just left the port for the next sailing and ‘a kind of wine’ He drank too much port last night. The word port in both
sentences is pronounced and spelled the same, yet their meanings are unrelated.
3. Lexical Semantics
Knowing the relations between words and meanings is necessary to understand polysemy. Those relations are studied in lexical semantics. Baldwin
2003 defines lexical semantics as “the study of what individual lexical items
mean, why they mean, what they do, how we can represent all of this, and where the combined interpretation for an utterance comes from
” p. 2. Thus, each lexical item has its own meaning. The relation between lexical item and its
meaning is lexical semantics. Cruse 2006 defines lexical semantics as the study of the meaning of
content words. Content words are the words that have already had their own meanings for example dog, rose, and run. In other words, content words can stand
alone and convey their meanings without any additional items. The opposite of content words is form or grammatical words that have a function in grammatical
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constructions for example the, of, and by. Form or grammatical words must be combined with content words in order to have a meaning.
4. Dictionary-Style Definition
