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Polysemy is one of those complex phenomena in the study of meanings. Polysemous words can have several meanings and it is rather complicated to
know each meaning only by holding onto one possible meaning. An individual word has a meaning and words in phrases and sentences
have meanings as well. Therefore, the major division of semantics is between the study of the meanings of words, namely lexical semantics, and the study of word
meanings to determine the meaning of phrases and sentences, namely compositional semantics.
a. Lexical Semantics
Lexical semantics is the study of meaning in a word level. Lexical semantics describes the meaning representation of every word in the language and
the relations among the meanings of the words in the language Saeed, 2003. Cruse 2006 defines lexical semantic as the study of “the meaning of words; the
focus here is on ‘content’ words like tiger, daffodil, inconsiderate, and woo, rather than ‘form’’grammatical’ words like the, of, than, and so on” p. 15. Content
words are words that can stand alone and have already had their own meaning while form or grammatical words are words that have a function in grammatical
constructions of phrases or sentences. Pustejovsky 1995 gives more specific definition of lexical semantics as “the study of how and what the words of a
language denote” p. 1. In short, lexical semantics studies the meaning of an individual word.
Thus, lexical semantics deals with the collection of words or lexicon. The common way to find the meanings of a word is by looking it up in the dictionary.
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Another way to find meanings of a word is by analyzing the semantic features of words that is
“conditions that must be met in order for a word to be appropriate to use” Bergmann, Hall, Ross, 2010, p. 246. For example, the word stallion
which refers to a male horse has the semantic features as [+animal] [+mammal] [+horse] [+male]. Those features show that the stallion is not a mare which is a
female horse, or it is not a dog which is not a horse. The relation among words also determines the meaning of the word. Some
examples of word relations are hyponymy the meaning of words that is included in other word meanings, synonymy words that have the same meanings, and
antonymy words that have the opposite meanings. This study will investigate the polysemy phenomenon where a single word
has several meanings. Geeraerts 2010 claims that polysemy is the result of the fact that meaning is changed when language is used in new situations and
contexts. Multiple meanings, such as polysemy, happen under this circumstance. Thus, lexical semantics is also used to study polysemy as it also deals with a word
that has multiple meanings.
b. Compositional Semantics
