The Spectrum of Sense Remoteness in Polysemy: Bridging Computational and Theoretical Lexicography with Psycholinguistics (Part 2)

Abstract

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data. In the second part, we show that polysemy is not a stable phenomenon and relations between senses may differ across language users. For instance, our fifty-fifty class or borderline cases may be represented differently by different language users depending on their perception of the world, world knowledge, associations. We point to some parameters of variation in the class of polysemy by metonymy and polysemy by metaphor which may affect their sense remoteness and consequently also the way they are represented in the mental lexicon.