Polysemy means lexical ambiguity, i.e., the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used―in different contexts―to express two or more different meanings.

"Polysemes share an etymology, unlike homonyms, which have developed from different sources and coincidently settled upon the same form." (Wikipedia, 2005).

Literature:

Boguraev, B. & Pustejovsky, J. (Eds.): Lexical semantics: The problem of polysemy. Oxford, UK.: Clarendon Press.

De Loupy, C. & El-Bèze, M. (2002).Managing Synonymy and Polysemy in a Document Retrieval System Using WordNet. Actes du Workshop Creating and Using Semantic for Information Retrieval and Filtering; Las Palmas, Espagne http://www.sinequa.com/sq-lab-doc/lrec2002.pdf (Visited February 21, 2004).

Verspoor, C. M. (1997). Contextually-Dependent Lexical Semantics . Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh. (PhD-dissertation). http://web.archive.org/web/20041010114540/http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~kversp/ftp_html/thesis.html

 (Visited January 31, 2004)

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2005). Polysemy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy

Birger Hjørland

Last updated: 12-02-2007

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