Ambiguities we live by: towards a pragmatics of polysemy

Abstract Contrary to traditional research into polysemy and ambiguity, we argue that polysemy is neither just a phenomenon of the dictionary, nor a purely cognitive phenomenon, but that its exploitation in everyday discourse has important communicational and pragmatic functions. Contrary to current work in psycholinguistics, we argue that ambiguity should not only be studied in vitro, as in priming studies and similar approaches using decontextualized samples, but that it should be analysed in vivo. Contrary to some older theories of implicature and some newer theories of relevance, we argue that people who engage in conversation do not always strive for rationality and relevance, that they do not always intend words to have one meaning and ‘disambiguate’ polysemous words automatically in context. The use and understanding of polysemous words may have costs in terms of processing time, but what Kittay (1987) calls ‘purposive ambiguity’ has important semantic, pragmatic and conversational benefits, such as reinforcing the semantic links between the nodes in a network of senses, strengthening the social bonds between those who exploit polysemy in conversation, and helping to negotiate crucial junctures between conversational turns.