Polysemy!
As far as I can tell from my linguistics "textbook" polysemy means when a word has multiple meanings. Woohoo, of course words have different meanings, especially words like "cool" and "gay" and other slang words... because once upon a time they weren't slang.
Here's the cool thing that I learned from reading this section--Verbs have an average of 2.11 meanings and nouns have an average of 1.74 meanings! Weird. Whoever thought of taking the time to figure that out? (Apparently Miller & Fellbaum in 1991 and 92).
P.S. The name of my texbook is Language Change: Progress or Decay by Jean Aitchison. It's actually quite good and it's actually about the size of a novel, almost 300 pages, small, paperback and incredibly readable. Not too dense at all. Not textbook-y. Sometimes the analogies are a bit overdone, but I guess they really do help me to understand what's going on.
Here's the cool thing that I learned from reading this section--Verbs have an average of 2.11 meanings and nouns have an average of 1.74 meanings! Weird. Whoever thought of taking the time to figure that out? (Apparently Miller & Fellbaum in 1991 and 92).
P.S. The name of my texbook is Language Change: Progress or Decay by Jean Aitchison. It's actually quite good and it's actually about the size of a novel, almost 300 pages, small, paperback and incredibly readable. Not too dense at all. Not textbook-y. Sometimes the analogies are a bit overdone, but I guess they really do help me to understand what's going on.
Labels: linguistics, nouns, polysemy, textbooks, verbs
posted by Shelby at 6:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home