The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

2.3 Representing Synonymy and Polysemy 
A discussion of synonymy and polysemy must necessarily involve a discussion of 
different theories of meaning. The choices we make about the structure of language, the way 
lexical meaning is represented, how lexical items interact with complex expressions and the 
relations that exist between lexical items to a large extent determine how synonymy and 
polysemy will be described theoretically. The following discussion describes 3 views of 
language and how each accounts for polysemy within a single lexical item and relations of 
synonymy among several items. 
I begin (§2.3.1) by describing the traditional view of language, where each word has 
a single meaning and words are combined as building blocks to form larger structures. Later 
versions, usually termed structuralist, adopt features in defining lexical items. Next, I 
describe (§2.3.2) decompositional theories where lexical items are internally structured, and 
have more stored information than in the traditional view. Pustejovsky (1995) and Jackendoff 
(1990) represent this decompositional view. Because synonymy is minimally discussed by 
these two authors, Murphy’s (2003) account of semantic relations is treated. The final view 
(§2.3.3), represented by Goldberg (1995) and Langacker (2008), proposes the existence of 
structures larger than words which are able to carry meaning.
2.3.1 The Traditional and Structuralist View 
The discussion in this subsection is based mostly on Pustejovsky (1995) and 
Langacker (2008), who provide a general overview and critique of the traditional theories. In 
the more traditional view of language every lexical item has a single meaning. An entry is 
composed of the necessary and sufficient conditions to differentiate it from others, making 
some lexical entries extremely short. Some theories, especially more recent structuralist 
views, adopt features. A lexical item such as 
bachelor
could be defined as [male], [human], 
[adult] and [unmarried] (based on work by Katz in the 1960s). Sentences are formed by 
joining words, and their meanings, into certain configurations to derive a proposition. In other 
words, lexical items are conceived of as building blocks, discrete elements that are stacked 
together to form complex expressions (Langacker 2008:39). The meaning of the whole is 
made up of the sum of its parts, a characteristic called