Systematic polysemy in lexicology and lexicography

The phenomenon of systematic polysemy offers a fruitful do­ main forexamlnlng the theoretical differences between lexicological and lexicographic approaches to description. We consider here the process that provides for systematic conversion of count to mass nouns in English (a chicken ^ chicken, an oak ^ oak etc.). From the point of vlew of lexicology, we argue, standard syntactic and pragmatic tests suggest the phenomenon should be described by means of a single unlndlvlduated transfer function thatdoes notdlstlnguish between interpretations (rabbit = "meat" vs. "fur"). From thepointofviewoflexicography. however, these pragmatically determined "sense precisions" are made part of explicit description via the inclusion ofsemantlc "llcenses,"a mechanism distinct from lexical rules. 1. Systematic Polysemy It is well known that we can make productive generalizations about the relations among word uses, say in the form of implicational statements like: '1f a word has a use of type s, it also has a use of type s'." Thus a word that denotes a place or kind of place can be used to refer to the people who live there (The city /county /state votedfor Jones); a word that denotes a periodical publication or kind of periodical publication can be used to refer to its publisher (The newspaper I The Times opposed the project); and so on. In recent years these regularities have been increasingly prominent in lexical research. In this paper, we will describe the general phenomenon of transfer as "systematic polysemy," and we will use the term "transfer functions" to describe the mappings from one class of words to another. Systematic polysemy raises a number of problems for lexicographers, particularly if dictionaries are to be modified to accommodate new types of users and new applications. Some of the difficulties are essentially structural or organizational. Conventional, itembased formats provide no obvious place for listing regularities like these. And even if devices are introduced to represent them, say via the kinds of codes that are used to represent syntactic classes, it is not a simple matter to accommodate their use to ordinary conceptions of sense-structure, or to coordinate their treatment in the defining process. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we will assume that lexicographers have available a format in which such rules can be represented, whether as designed for print or computational presentation. We will also assume some mechanism for achieving con-