[Lingtyp] Does bipolar polysemy exist?

Giorgio Francesco Arcodia giorgio.arcodia at unimib.it
Thu May 31 11:06:45 UTC 2018


I don't know if that counts, but: in Italian, *ospite* means both 'host'
and 'guest'. In a given situation, you can't be both, so, (I guess) in a
sense this word can be the negation of itself.

Apologies, semantics is not my *forte.*

Best,

Giorgio
馬振國

2018-05-31 13:03 GMT+02:00 Mattis List <mattis.list at lingpy.org>:

> Wouldn't the frequent cases of pronouns or pronoun-like words in French
> (personne = "person, nobody", pas = "step, not", etc.) come close to
> this notion? And this process has historically also be claimed for other
> negation words, like Ancient Greek "ou", if I am not mistaken.
>
> Best,
>
> Mattis
>
> On 2018-05-31 12:57, Joo Ian wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> >
> >
> > I would like to know if the following universal claim holds:
> >
> >
> >
> > /There exists no lexeme that can mean X and the negation of X. (For
> > example, no lexeme can express “to go” and “to not go”)./
> >
> >
> >
> > I wonder if such “bipolar polysemy” exists in any lexeme, because I
> > cannot think of any, and whether this claim is truly universal.
> >
> > I would appreciate to know if there is any counter-evidence.
> >
> >
> >
> > From Hong Kong,
> >
> > Ian Joo
> >
> > http://ianjoo.academia.edu
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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-- 
Prof. Dr. Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
馬振國博士 副教授
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
米蘭比克卡大學
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione
教育學系
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20126 Milano  意大利 米蘭

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