Литература по учебной дисциплине «Практика устной и письменной речи»

3.3. Polysemy
The word polysemy is of Greek origin denoting “having many meanings”. Every meaning in the language is signalled either by the form of the word itself or by context. The unity of the form and content of a polysemantic word is kept in its lexico-grammatical variant.
All the lexico-grammatical variants of a word taken together form its semantic structure. The semantic structure of a word is a set of interrelated lexico-grammatical variants with different denotative and sometimes connotative components of meaning. These variants belong to the same set because they are expressed by the same combination of morphemes, although in different contextual conditions. The elements are interrelated due to the existence of the common semantic component. E.g., youth—(1) “the friends of one’s youth”, (2) “a young man”, and (3) “young men and women”. These variants form a structured set because they are expressed by the same sound complex and they all contain the semantic component “young”.
Polysemy exists only in language, not in speech. An isolated word in a dictionary is usually given with all its meanings (the semantic structure of a word in language), but taken in any definite context, the word has only the meaning required by the text. E.g., act has several meanings: “do something, behave, take part in a play, pretend”. In the sentence Some men have acted courage who had it not; but no man can act wit the word act means “pretend”.
Synchronically, we understand polysemy as the co-existence of various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period of language development. There are different types of lexical meaning as elements of a word’s semantic structure.
(1) General vs. special/particular. The general meaning occurs in various and widely different contexts; special meanings are observed only in certain contexts, e.g., technical meanings of the word power.
(2) Central/main vs. minor/peripheral. The meaning that first occurs to us when we hear the cluster of sounds, i.e. the most frequent meaning of the word is the central one. All other meanings are minor in comparison.