Polysemy

Polysemy is, according to Webster's Collegiate, the multiplicity of meanings. It is the opposite of monosemy. The word was coined by Michel Bréal, founder of historical semantics, preoccupied, as was his contemporary Antoine Darmesteter, with the evolution of meaning in words. American linguists, often working with utterances, generally speak of lexical ambiguity. But polysemy is a reality, as witnessed by subsenses (usually numbered) in a dictionary entry. Cf. cause, rebellion, rebel (n.& adj.). The vast majority of words are polysemous and, generally speaking, only technical or scientific words are monosemic, at least immediately after being coined or derived. The most abstruse the science or field, the longer monosemy will prevail. Some linguists even suggested that polysemy was paradoxically a sign of meaning depletion, due to frequent uses. Polysemy is especially exploited in poetry and puns.

Some words have more potential than others for polysemy or polysemic development. »Etiolate« as compared to »Uxorious«, for instance. This is due in part to their combinatorial possibility with other words in creative sentences (as opposed to standard or cliché uses). But even »uxorious« is bisemic, although the dictionary fails to mark the difference between »being excessively fond of« and »being excessively submissive to« (a wife). The test, as always in semantics and linguistics, is substitution. None of the four senses or »fond« can be construed as equivalent to »submissive«. Polysemic potential can be assimilated with the contextual capacity of a word, and can be seen as the application of a given context to the word in question, in a relationship similar to that of argument and predicate.

The Polysemy nature of words and/or signs is rooted in the ambiguous and perhaps arbitrary inherent meaning of words and/or signs.