Cover not available
Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 12:2 (2014) ► pp.259–287

Shoes, boots and vertical polysemes

The dynamic construal and conventionality of word senses

| De Montfort University, Leicester

This paper considers lexical items such as shoe, whose meaning can be construed more broadly or narrowly (i.e., as either including or excluding boots), and examines how this type of “vertical” meaning variation relates to the distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. I argue that the broader and narrower readings of a single lexical form can be treated as polysemous senses to the extent that they exhibit some symptoms of autonomy as contextually construed sense units. However, as some vertical polysemes’ senses also exhibit symptoms of unity, they fall in between ambiguity and vagueness. As word senses are here defined as contextually construed units of meaning, their autonomy is considered independently from their conventionality. However, a corpus study of pairs of words with a dual inclusion/contrast relationship (including shoe/boot, cup/mug, dog/bitch, meat/chicken and dog/puppy) suggests that even senses that exhibit a low degree of autonomy may nevertheless be conventionalised.

Keywords: autohyponymy, polysemy, conventionality
Published online: 31 October 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.12.2.01kos
References
Allwood, J
(2003) Meaning potentials and context: Some consequences for the analysis of variation in meaning. In H. Cuyckens, R. Dirven & J. Taylor (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics (pp. 29–66). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becker, T
(2002) Autohyponymy: Implicature in lexical semantics, word formation, and grammar. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 14 (2), 105–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J
(2006) From usage to grammar: the mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82 (4), 711–733. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carston, R
(2002) Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Church, K., & Hanks, P
(1990) Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics, 16 (1), 22–29.Google Scholar
Collins English dictionary
(9th ed.) (2007) Glasgow: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Croft, W., & Cruse, D.A
(2004) Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruse, D.A
(2000) Aspects of the microstructure of word meanings. In Y. Ravin & C. Leacock (Eds.), Polysemy: Theoretical and computational approaches (pp. 30–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2008) Lexical semantics without stable word meanings: a dynamic construal approach. In M. Casas Gómez & I. Rodríguez-Piñero Alcalá (Eds.), X Jornadas de lingüística (pp. 35–58). Cádiz: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz.Google Scholar
Davies, M
(2004–) BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at [URL].
(2012) A new approach to oppositions in discourse: The role of syntactic frames in the triggering of non-canonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics, 40 (1), 47–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, V
(2006) Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning-construction. Cognitive Linguistics, 17 (4), 491–534. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) How words mean: Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Falkum, I.L
(2011) The semantics and pragmatics of polysemy: A relevance-theoretic account. Doctoral dissertation, University College London.
Geeraerts, D., Grondelaers, S., & Bakema, P
(1994) The structure of lexical variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geeraerts, D
(1993) Vagueness’s puzzles, polysemy’s vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics, 4 (3), 223–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, H.P
(1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J.L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3. Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
(1978) Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Cole (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 9. Pragmatics (pp. 113–127). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M
(2006) Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics, 43 (1), 25–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007) Coordination. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. (2nd ed.) (pp. 1–51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hearst, M.A
(1992) Automatic acquisition of hyponyms from large text corpora. Proceedings of the fourteenth international conference on computational linguistics , Nantes, France . DOI logo
Horn, L.R
(1984) Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications (pp. 11–42). Washington: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Huang, Y
(2009) Neo-Gricean pragmatics and the lexicon. International Review of Pragmatics, 11, 118–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, S
(2002) Antonymy: A corpus-based perspective. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, S., Murphy, M.L., Paradis, C., & Willners, C
(2012) Antonyms in English: Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kempson, R.M
(1980) Ambiguity and word meaning. In S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik (Eds.), Studies in English linguistics (pp. 7–16). London: Longman.Google Scholar
Koskela, A
(2013)  Inclusion, contrast and polysemy in dictionaries: The relationship between theory, language use and lexicographic practice . Paper presented at the Meaning, Context and Cognition conference 2013, Łódź, Poland.
Labov, W
(1973) The boundaries of words and their meaning. In C.N. Bailey & R.W. Shuy (Eds.), New ways of analyzing variation in English (pp. 340–373). Washington: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Lang, E
(1984) The semantics of coordination. Translated by J. Pheby. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R.W
(1987) Foundations of cognitive grammar: Vol. 1. Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lehrer, A
(1990a) Prototype theory and its implications for lexical analysis. In S.L. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Meanings and prototypes: Studies in linguistic categorization (pp. 368–381). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
(1990b) Polysemy, conventionality, and the structure of the lexicon. Cognitive Linguistics, 1 (2), 207–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J
(1977) Semantics: Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mettinger, A
(1994) Aspects of semantic opposition in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mititelu, V.B
(2006) Automatic extraction of patterns displaying hyponym-hypernym co-occurrence from corpora. Proceedings of the first CESCL , Budapest, Hungary .
Noteboom, S., Weerman, F., & Wijnen, F
(2002) Minimising or maximising storage? An introduction. In S. Noteboom, F. Weerman & F. Wijnen (Eds.), Storage and computation in the language faculty (pp. 1–19). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oxford English dictionary
(2nd ed.) (1989) Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Quine, W.V.O
(1960) Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, G
(1985a) Dogs, bitches and other creatures. Journal of Semantics, 41, 117–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1985b) Unmarked and marked terms in English. In G.A.J. Hoppenbrouwers, 
P.A.M. Seuren & A.J.M. M. Weijters (Eds.), Meaning and the lexicon (pp. 63–71). 
Dordrecht: Forris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmid, H.-J
(2010) Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system? In D. Glynn & K. Fischer (Eds.), Quantitative methods in cognitive semantics: Corpus-­driven approaches (pp. 101–134). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinha, C
(1999) Grounding, mapping and acts of meaning. In T. Janssen & G. Redeker (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope and methodology (pp. 223–255). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, A
(2006) Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2 (1), 61–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S.T
(2003) Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8 (2), 209–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, J.R
(2012) The mental corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, J.R., Cuyckens, H., & Dirven, R
(2003) Introduction: New directions in cognitive lexical semantic research. In H. Cuyckens, R. Dirven & J.R. Taylor (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics (pp. 1–28). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, E.C., & Dasher, R.B
(2002) Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tuggy, D
(1993) Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness. Cognitive Linguistics, 4 (3), 273–290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1999) Linguistic evidence for polysemy in the mind: A response to William Croft and Dominiek Sandra. Cognitive Linguistics, 10 (4), 343–368.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A
(1996) Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, D
(2003) Relevance and lexical pragmatics. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 15 (2), 273–291.Google Scholar
Wilson, D., & Carston, R
(2007) A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics (pp. 230–259). Palgrave, London. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zwicky, A.M., & Sadock, J.M
(1975) Ambiguity tests and how to fail them. In J.P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 4. (pp. 1–36). London: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

KOSKELA, ANU
2017. Coatsandbrasandjeans– andclothes, too: lexical contrast between hyperonyms and hyponyms. English Language and Linguistics 21:3 ► pp. 475 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.