The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

compositionality
. 

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10 | 
Synonymy is captured not by any connection between the words, but by virtue of 
having the same features. The word 
bachelor
and the phrase 
unmarried man
, for example, 
would be synonyms because they are both characterized by the same set of features (Lakoff 
1987:136). Synonymy is not the type of information that is stored in the lexicon; instead it is 
derived by comparison of items in the lexicon. Recall (§2.1) that the traditional view on 
synonymy was that it was assessed by comparing the truth-conditions of sentences.
The traditional view on polysemy is more fleshed out, though it has been heavily 
criticized. There are two ways to handle polysemy: the homonomy approach and the 
monosemy approach (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2007:152, Langacker 2008:38). In the first, 
the lexicon contains multiple listings of the same word, each with a different definition 
(Pustejovsky 1995:34). The typical example is 
bank
. There is one entry, call it 
bank
1
,
which 
refers to the financial institution and a second entry 
bank
2
 
meaning the edge of a river.
The major problem with this approach is that it cannot account for cases where the 
senses are clearly related. With the word 
bank
this model is acceptable, since most speakers 
do not view the senses as related. But often, the two meanings are in fact connected. 
Pustejovsky (1995) exemplifies this with the adjective 
noisy
. A 
noisy car
is an object that 
makes noise, while a 
noisy
cafeteria
is a location that is characterized by noise. If we 
represent these two senses of 
noisy
as distinct lexical items we do not capture the fact that 
they are clearly related (1995:50). The model with multiple listings does not represent any 
connections between lexical items and therefore cannot capture cases where there is a 
semantic association (1995:37). 
The monosemy view avoids multiple entries. Instead a lexical item has a single 
abstract meaning. The specific meaning required in a context will be determined by 
pragmatics and the meanings of the other elements in the sentence (Pustejovsky 1995:43). 
For example, the verb 
begin
could have a very abstract definition, such as ‘start an action’. 
The meaning of 
begin a book
will be derived by world knowledge that one usually reads or 
writes books. 
The problem with the monosemy view of language is that it does not account for how 
speakers put lexical items to use (Pustejovsky 1995:43). That is, if a speaker wants to state 
that he began looking for a word in a dictionary, given this abstract meaning of 
begin
, a 
speaker could say 
she began the dictionary
; yet this phrase is not acceptable. A meaning that 
is too abstract does not capture the limitations in the use of a word. Speakers must have this 
type of information in order to produce language. 

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11 | 
To summarize, synonymy is captured by lexical items having the same features. The 
lexicon does not contain any explicit connection between synonymous words. Synonymy is 
instead a relation that must be derived by comparison. The traditional view includes two 
representations of polysemy. In a homonymy version, two or more separate entries are 
required, one for each sense. There are no connections between related senses. A monosemy 
approach uses abstract definitions, but it cannot explain language in use.