Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language (review)

Polysemy recently has attracted interest mainly from two camps in linguistics. For computational linguists, word-sense disambiguation is a question of necessity. For cognitive linguists, meaning extensions and meaning networks provide crucial evidence to support core tenets of their theory. The current volume unites both approaches with a tilt towards the cognitive side.

The first section, ‘Setting the scene’, contains three introductory papers, one by Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke, in which they summarize the other contributions (3–30), one by John Taylor about cognitive models of polysemy (31–47), and one by Brigitte Nerlich on the history of the field (49–76).

The second section focuses specifically on approaches to polysemy in cognitive linguistics. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue for the pervasiveness of conceptual blending (79–94), Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans present a new approach to prepositional polysemy networks (95–159), Jarno Raukko, backed by experimental evidence, tries to find common ground between monosemists and polysemists with a concept of ‘flexible meaning’ (161–93), and Ken-ichi Seto proposes new definitions for the concepts of metonymy and synecdoche to account better for polysemic sense extension (195–214).

The third section, ‘Synchrony/diachrony approaches’, features contributions by Adrienne Lehrer on polysemy in English derivational affixes (217–32), by Beatrice Warren on links and qualia in modifier-head constructions (233–51), by Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis on semantic bleaching of lexical items denoting a calamity (253–65), and by Andreas Blank, who claims that semantic innovations are frequently triggered by discourse rules (267–93).

In the fourth section, Rachel Giora and Inbal Gur use psycholinguistic evidence to argue that salient meanings of polysemous expressions are always activated in the hearer’s minds, even when disfavored by context (297–315). Ann Dowker shows how children’s understanding of polysemous meanings of words improve with age (317–32). Brigitte Nerlich, Zazie Todd, and David D. Clarke demonstrate how children acquire polysemies, investigating the case of English get (333–57).

The last section is devoted to computational approaches. Adam Kilgariff disputes the validity of the concept of ‘word senses’ and posits concrete occurrences of words in contexts as the basic units for computer lexicography (361–91). Yorick Wilks takes an opposite stance, reporting positively on advances in word-sense disambiguation but noting some outstanding problems at the same time (393–409). The papers are followed by a comprehensive index.

The volume is finely edited and excels in many respects. First of all, this will be the best introduction to the topic at present. Not all approaches are represented here equally well, but they are given their due, including the contributions of generative semanticists, especially James Pustejovsky (see e.g. Pustejovsky’s The generative lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Furthermore, the articles are generally up-to-date and of high standard. Together they provide an excellent overview of the field. Students of cognitive linguistics and semantics will not want to miss this volume.