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The examples are the word table
1
as a noun as in, on the table and table
2
as a verb as in,
Don’t table that document. Therefore, a polysemous word has a property as having single syntactic function part-of-speech.
b. Polysemy and Homonymy
Traditionally, the distinction between polysemy and homonymy is drawn Lyon, 1995. Both are the cases of multiple meanings where the former refers to
a single word having several meanings, whereas the latter is a relation between two or more different words with the same form. Lyons adds that the distinction
between polysemy and homonymy “is not always clear-cut in particular instances” p.58.
Lyons 1995 draws two criteria to differentiate polysemy from homonymy. The first one is etymology or the historical source of the words. The
origin of a word can support its meaning. One word may have two meanings at present which is possible when the word for each meaning derived in its
etymology has two different words. For example the word bat
1
mammal with membranous wings and bat
2
tool for striking a ball in certain games considered as one word but different lexemes having two meanings. In respect of their
etymology, the word bat has a different historical source as bat
1
derived from Middle English bakke, and bat
2
derived from Old English batt meaning ‘club’, or
‘cudgel’. However, this etymological criterion is not always clear-cut or exact. The reason is, many words have uncertain historical derivation Klepousniotou,
2001. Another reason according to Lyons 1977b is there is no a clear point of how far the history of words should be traced back. Saeed 2001 gives another
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reason that “speaker may differ in their intuitions, and worse, historical fact and speaker intuitions may contradict to each other” p. 65. The example of this case
is the two words sole bottom of the foot and sole flatfish which are considered as homonym although they are
“historically derived via French from the same Latin word solea which means
‘sandal” Saeed, 2001, p. 65. The second criterion is the relatedness of meaning, that a certain meaning
is connected to other meanings. For example, the word foot can have meanings as ‘terminal part of a leg’ and ‘lowest part of a mountain’. The relatedness of those
two meanings is they are located in the bottom of something and have a function to support the whole body. Lyon 1977b and Klepousniotou 2001 claim that the
relatedness of meaning here does not merely mean that there is a relation or there is no relation at all, but it is a matter of degree. Thus, it is difficult to decide
universal criteria of degree to determine the relatedness and unrelatedness of meaning. Lipka 1992, referring to the previous work of Lyon 1997b, argues
that this second criterion is difficult to apply because of the existence of “subjective association, for determining semantic relatedness” p. 138. A single
person may merely decide whether two words are related or unrelated which does not fulfill an objective procedure; and another single person may have a different
decision. The general distinction of polysemy and homonymy are their entries in the
dictionary or lexicon. In the dictionaries, polysemy belongs to a single lexical entry one head-word with all senses and homonymy belongs to separate entries
several head-words Kreidler, 1998; Cruse, 2006; Koskela Murphy, 2006.
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This study will use the same distinction. Thus, a polysemous word has a single lexical entry in the dictionaries Apresjan, 2000; Murphy, 2003.
c. Types of Polysemy
