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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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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.
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