[Lexicog] Lexical polysemy

[Patrick Hanks]

My view is that English monolingual dictionaries (of the kinds that I
have been editing all my life) give a very distorted picture of polysemy.
Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that word meaning is vague,
while dictionaries try to be precise. Numbered senses improve clarity,
accessibility, readability, etc., but they imply a kind of spurious
precision, I think

Consider a simple verb at the start of the alphabet -- "abandon".
MWIII offers 7 senses and 3 subsenses.  CED also has 7 senses.
NSOED has 6.  These appear to be mutually exclusive, but in fact
they are not.  For example, it could be argued that only the context,
not the sense of the verb, is different in "abandon a site", "abandon
a person", and "abandon a vehicle".  The 6 or 7 senses could easily
be reduced to 3 or 4 senses by rewriting some of the definitions at
a more general level.   Alternatively, one could further split "abandon"
into a dozen or more senses by treating, say, "abandon a refrigerator"
as different from "abandon a car".

NSOED lumps "Parisians abandoning their city to scalding sunshine"
in with "a schoolgirl abandoning herself to grief" (because of the to-PP).
But other dictionaries make the split differently, giving a higher
priority to the reflexive pronoun and a lower priority to the PP.
If you do this, "abandoning the city to something" ends up with
"abandoning a site".

So my first point is that there is no one "correct" way to split up the
different uses of a word into meanings.  Definition writing is more a
matter of market forces (how big do we want our dictionary to be?),
and (dare I say it) of art, taste, and judgement, rather than the
application of data-driven rules.

My second point is that it's often better to read a group of different
definitions as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I don't
know of any dictionary users who are taught to read definitions in
this way, and even if they were, there is nothing in the dictionary text
to tell them which definition groups are mutually exclusive and which
are complementary.   (If I remember rightly, in the first edition of COD,
1911, the Fowlers used numbers only for mutually exclusive sense
groups.)

My third point is that, even when splitting is well justified (i.e. when
senses really are mutually exclusive), there is no indication of
relative frequency.  For many polysemous words, one sense (or
sometimes one group of complementary senses) accounts for 80%
or 90% of the uses, while the remainder are quite rare.   So, for
example, "abandoning oneself to something" accounts for only
around 1% of all uses of  "abandon" in the British National
Corpus -- a balanced and representative collection of texts.
Some dictionaries record an even rarer use of "abandon", a
domain-specific term in the insurance world, defined in NSOED
as "relinquish a claim to (property insured) to underwriters."  This
is the sort of sense that is supported by citations collected from
domain-specific reading, rather than from corpus analysis of a
general corpus. I think it's fair to say that this specialist sense
accounts for much less than 0.1% of uses of "abandon" in general
English, but of course it's just the sort of use that users of a large
monolingual dictionary like to have explained.

Patrick Hanks













----- Original Message -----
From: "Rusmadi Baharudin" <rusmadi at dbp.gov.my>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 1:22 AM
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] Other topics?


> What about the treatment of polysemous word in the dictionary? Polysemy
> - a multiple but related meanings for a single form - poses a problem in
> semantic theory and the semantic applications such as lexicography and
> natural language processing system. It seem that in lexicographic
> practice there is no objective criteria for the analysis and the
> treatment of this polysemous word. Anyone out there to share a comment
> on this matter?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lexicography2004 [mailto:lexicography2004 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 6:42 AM
> To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Lexicog] Other topics?
>
> What other lexicography topics would any of you on the list like to
> discuss?
>
>
> Wayne
> -----
> Wayne Leman
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