Quotes About Polysemy

The enmeshing of polysemy with grammar is also visible in one of the ways that Americans and Britons are divided by their common language. When a product gives its name to an employer, the name is singular in the United States (The Globe is expanding its comics section) but plural in the United Kingdom (The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books).

The reason to believe that many polysemous meanings are memorized, rather than stretched as the need arises, is that they are conventional—they are arbitrary practices of a language community, neither deducible nor universal.

Polysemy refers to a word's having a number of distinct but related senses, and is different from two other ways in which a sound can have multiple meanings.