Types of Meaning of a Polysemantic Word from the Historical Perspective

2223 Words9 Pages
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE, YOUTH AND SPORT OF UKRAINE Kyiv National Linguistic University Project Work in English Lexicology TYPES OF MEANING OF A POLYSEMANTIC WORD FROM THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Martynovs`ka Anastasiia Group 312 Translators`/Interpreters1 Department Research supervisor: V. G. Nikonova Professor, Doctor of Philology Kyiv – 2012 The modern term polysemy was popularized by Bréal in 1887. Most modern linguistics dealing with the topic of polysemy refer to the crucial date , but they rarely look further back into the past. The “roots” of the concept of polysemy lie in the Greek philosophy, that is, the debate surrounding the problem of naturalness or arbitrariness of signs as debated in Plato’s (429-347B.C.) Cratylus. The first who used the term polysemous in a relatively modern sense was Dante, who wrote about polysemous character of a poem: “This work doesn’t have one simple meaning, on the contrary, I say that it can be polysemous, that is can have many meanings”. Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and concepts as every object and every notion has many features and a concept reflected in a word always contains a generalisation of several traits of the object. A word which has more than one meaning is called polysemantic. Different meanings of a polysemantic word may come together due to the proximity of notions which they express e.g. the word “blanket” has the following meanings: a woolen covering used on beds, a covering for keeping a horse warm, a covering of any kind (a blanket of snow), covering all or most cases used attributively, e.g. we can say “a blanket insurance policy”. There are some words in the language which are monosemantic, such as most terms, synonym, some pronouns (this, my, both), numerals. There are two processes

More about Types of Meaning of a Polysemantic Word from the Historical Perspective

Open Document