[Lexicog] lexical polysemy

[John Roberts]

Peter Kirk wrote:

> On the last point, only because "abandon" seems to imply some kind of
> intent, which isn't usually the case with books, at least for us
> bibliophiles. (Even the runaway pet cockroach has some kind of intent!)
> It can be used of some small objects e.g. I have certainly heard of
> abandoning a plate, having eaten off it. And I did have to abandon some
> of my books in Azerbaijan when I returned to England, although I would
> probably say "left" because I gave them away to good homes (or
> second-hand stores) rather than dumping them.

How does the car I abandoned on the motorway have intent?

It is interesting to see how some dictionaries that are corpus based differ
with regard to senses for "abandon" under the hypernym "leave". The New
Oxford Dictionary of English has just two primary senses (1) give up
completely a course of action, practice or way of thinking (2) cease to
support or look after someone. Subsenses under (2) are leave a place and
leave a thing. So for NODE "abandon a course of action" and "abandon a
person" are the primary senses of "abandon". COBUILD has four senses (1)
abandon a place or object, (2) abandon someone, (3) abandon a piece of work,
activity, (4) abandon an idea. The Longman Activator has one sense of
"abandon" under key concept "STOP DOING SOMETHING 3" abandon a project,
search, struggle, efforts, etc. and another sense under key concept "GIVE
12" - to unwillingly give something back to someone else or stop having it
yourself. The Longman Activator does not seem to have the "abandon a person"
sense at all and NODE and COBUILD differ as to what they consider primary
and secondary senses of "abandon". Yet they have all extracted these senses
from analyzing large corpora of English texts.

John Roberts




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