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The problems of studying the lexical structure of a word have a way out into various areas of cognitive science, including biosemiotics. In the article, the biosemiotic approach is reframed into a biosemantic approach based on decoding specific lexical structures. The lexical invariants of polysemous words are shown to be meaningful cores of their figurative meanings. It is a set of dominant semantic components that are stably associated with each lexeme’s meaning. In the process of semiosis, the individual is guided by these invariant components. These components are formed over time in the individual's cognitive niche as a result of observations of the relationship between language signs. The practical part of the article includes an empirical invariant-component analysis of the English polysemous substantive “a hood” from the standpoint of invariant semantics. Given the results, biosemiotics has an advantage over traditional semantics in describing the semantics of lexical units., Os problemas de estudar a estrutura lexical de uma palavra têm saída para várias áreas da ciência cognitiva, incluindo a biossemiótica. No artigo, a abordagem biossemiótica é reformulada em uma abordagem biossemântica baseada na decodificação de estruturas lexicais específicas. Os invariantes lexicais de palavras polissêmicas são mostrados como núcleos significativos de seus significados figurativos. É um conjunto de componentes semânticos dominantes que estão associados de forma estável com o significado de cada lexema. No processo de semiose, o indivíduo é guiado por esses componentes invariantes. Esses componentes são formados ao longo do tempo no nicho cognitivo do indivíduo como resultado das observações da relação entre os signos da linguagem. A parte prática do artigo inclui uma análise empírica de componentes invariantes do substantivo polissêmico inglês “a hood” do ponto de vista da semântica invariante. Diante dos resultados, a biossemiótica tem vantagem sobre a semântica tradicional na descrição da semântica das unidades lexicais., Los problemas de estudiar la estructura léxica de una palabra tienen salida en varias áreas de la ciencia cognitiva, incluida la biosemiótica. En el artículo, el enfoque biosemiótico se reformula en un enfoque biosemántico basado en la decodificación de estructuras léxicas específicas. Se muestra que las invariantes léxicas de las palabras polisémicas son núcleos significativos de sus significados figurativos. Es un conjunto de componentes semánticos dominantes que se asocian de manera estable con cada significado de lexema. En el proceso de semiosis, el individuo se guía por estos componentes invariantes. Estos componentes se forman con el tiempo en el nicho cognitivo del individuo como resultado de las observaciones de la relación entre los signos del lenguaje. La parte práctica del artículo incluye un análisis empírico de componentes invariantes del sustantivo polisémico inglés “a hood” desde el punto de vista de la semántica invariante. Dados los resultados, la biosemiótica tiene una ventaja sobre la semántica tradicional al describir la semántica de las unidades léxicas.

This article aims at describing the different uses of the adverb simplement in contemporary French. Four uses are distinguished, based on semantic and syntactic criteria. The proposed semantic description has two main objectives: (i) to differentiate simplement from its synonyms (seulement and mais) and (ii) to highlight the common points between the different uses of simplement in order to eventually propose a unitary model of its semantic functioning. Throughout the study, a particular place is given to the commutation criterion: we wonder what its validity is in semantics and what problems it is likely to pose., Cet article a pour but de décrire les différents emplois de l'adverbe simplement en français contemporain. Quatre emplois sont distingués, sur la base de critères sémantiques et syntaxiques. La description sémantique proposée poursuit deux objectifs principaux : (i) différencier simplement de ses synonymes (seulement et mais) et (ii) mettre en évidence les points communs entre les différents emplois de simplement afin de proposer à terme une modélisation unitaire de son fonctionnement sémantique. Tout au long de l'étude, une place particulière est accordée au critère de commutation : on se demande quelle est sa validité en sémantique et quels problèmes il est susceptible de poser., Este artículo pretende describir los diferentes usos del adverbio simplement en francés contemporáneo. Se distinguen cuatro usos, basados en criterios semánticos y sintácticos. La descripción semántica propuesta tiene dos objetivos principales: (i) diferenciar simplement de sus sinónimos (seulement y mais) y (ii) destacar los puntos comunes entre los distintos usos de simplement para proponer posteriormente un modelo unitario de su funcionamiento semántico. A lo largo del estudio, se concede un lugar particular al criterio de conmutación: nos preguntamos cuál es su validez en semántica y qué problemas puede plantear.

Denna uppsats undersöker kontinuativer i elva germanska språk genom en kvantitiv och kvalitativ analys av korpusdata. Syftet är att undersöka om den lexikala förändring som beskrivs hos kontinuativer i svenska av Britse (2022) kan observeras i andra germanska språk. Studien ämnar även undersöka polysemin hos kontinuativer och föreslå en semantisk karta för dessa i germanska språk. För att ge ett diakront perspektiv har det numera utdöda språket gotiska inkluderats. Studien baseras till stor del på beskrivningar av faspolaritet, i synnerhet kontinuitet, i van der Auwera (2021) och Van Baar (1997), men även Panova (under revision). Resultaten visar att den lexikala förändring som förut beskrivits observeras i svenska, norskt bokmål, nynorsk och danska. I resten av de undersökta germanska språken finns svaga tendenser eller inga tendenser alls. Studien visar även på rika polysemiska nätverk, vilket följer beskrivning- arna i Van Baar (1997) och Panova (under revision). Gotiska följer tvärspråkliga mönster och presenterar även möjliga källor till komparativa partiklar vars användning överlappar kontinuativa uttryck., This thesis examines continuatives in eleven Germanic languages in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus data. The purpose is to investigate if the lexical change described in continuatives in Swedish by Britse (2022) can be observed in other Germanic languages. The study also aims to examine polysemy in continuous expressions och suggest a semantic map for these in Germanic languages. The now extinct language Gothic has been included for a diachronic perspective. The study is largely based on descriptions of phasal polarity, par- ticularly continuity, in van der Auwera (2021) and Van Baar (1997), but also Panova (under revision). The results show that the lexical change is observed in Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål, Nynorsk and Danish. In the rest of the analysed Germanic languages, it is not observed. The study shows rich polysemous networks, that follow descriptions in Van Baar (1997) and Panova (under revision). Gothic follows cross-linguistic patterns and also presents possible sources of comparative particles who’s usage overlaps that of continuatives.

Denna uppsats undersöker kontinuativer i elva germanska språk genom en kvantitiv och kvalitativ analys av korpusdata. Syftet är att undersöka om den lexikala förändring som beskrivs hos kontinuativer i svenska av Britse (2022) kan observeras i andra germanska språk. Studien ämnar även undersöka polysemin hos kontinuativer och föreslå en semantisk karta för dessa i germanska språk. För att ge ett diakront perspektiv har det numera utdöda språket gotiska inkluderats. Studien baseras till stor del på beskrivningar av faspolaritet, i synnerhet kontinuitet, i van der Auwera (2021) och Van Baar (1997), men även Panova (under revision). Resultaten visar att den lexikala förändring som förut beskrivits observeras i svenska, norskt bokmål, nynorsk och danska. I resten av de undersökta germanska språken finns svaga tendenser eller inga tendenser alls. Studien visar även på rika polysemiska nätverk, vilket följer beskrivning- arna i Van Baar (1997) och Panova (under revision). Gotiska följer tvärspråkliga mönster och presenterar även möjliga källor till komparativa partiklar vars användning överlappar kontinuativa uttryck., This thesis examines continuatives in eleven Germanic languages in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus data. The purpose is to investigate if the lexical change described in continuatives in Swedish by Britse (2022) can be observed in other Germanic languages. The study also aims to examine polysemy in continuous expressions och suggest a semantic map for these in Germanic languages. The now extinct language Gothic has been included for a diachronic perspective. The study is largely based on descriptions of phasal polarity, par- ticularly continuity, in van der Auwera (2021) and Van Baar (1997), but also Panova (under revision). The results show that the lexical change is observed in Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål, Nynorsk and Danish. In the rest of the analysed Germanic languages, it is not observed. The study shows rich polysemous networks, that follow descriptions in Van Baar (1997) and Panova (under revision). Gothic follows cross-linguistic patterns and also presents possible sources of comparative particles who’s usage overlaps that of continuatives.

First published: 21 May 2021, Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses —is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word’s meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

First published: 21 May 2021, Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses —is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word’s meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

This study attempts to analyze the phenomenon of polysemy correlates to the conceptual organization of cognitive categories, and the polysemantic structure is a category of a proto-typical nature. An invariant-component analysis of each of the figurative meanings and further comparing them with the semantics of the first nominative-nonderivative meaning are utilized to meet the study’s aims. The findings of the research of linguistic categorization of objects of reality with the identification of a set of central features, according to which a word is attributed to a particular category, leads to extrapolation of the research results to the structures of polysemantic words. The paper shows that both the members of the cognitive subject category and the figurative meanings of polysemantic are oriented toward the methods of conceptual and linguistic categorization of the real world, and both of them are turned “inward” in their own structure., Este estudo procura analisar o fenômeno da polissemia correlacionado com a organização conceitual das categorias cognitivas, sendo a estrutura polissemântica uma categoria de natureza prototípica. Uma análise de componentes invariantes de cada um dos significados figurativos e ainda comparando-os com a semântica do primeiro significado nominativo-não-derivativo são utilizados para atender aos objetivos do estudo. Os achados da pesquisa de categorização linguística de objetos da realidade com a identificação de um conjunto de traços centrais, segundo os quais uma palavra é atribuída a uma determinada categoria, leva à extrapolação dos resultados da pesquisa para as estruturas de palavras polissemânticas. O artigo mostra que tanto os membros da categoria de sujeito cognitivo quanto os significados figurativos da polissemântica são orientados para os métodos de categorização conceitual e linguística do mundo real, e ambos são voltados “para dentro” em sua própria estrutura., Este estudio intenta analizar que el fenómeno de la polisemia se correlaciona con la organización conceptual de las categorías cognitivas, y la estructura polisemántica es una categoría de naturaleza prototípica. Se utiliza un análisis de componentes invariantes de cada uno de los significados figurativos y una mayor comparación con la semántica del primer significado nominativo-no derivado para cumplir con los objetivos del estudio. Los hallazgos de la investigación de categorización lingüística de los objetos de la realidad con la identificación de un conjunto de características centrales, según las cuales una palabra se atribuye a una categoría particular, lleva a la extrapolación de los resultados de la investigación a las estructuras de las palabras polisemánticas. El artículo muestra que tanto los miembros de la categoría de sujeto cognitivo como los significados figurativos de polisemántica están orientados hacia los métodos de categorización conceptual y lingüística del mundo real, y ambos están vueltos “hacia adentro” en su propia estructura.

The Semantic Settling Dynamics model postulated that the seemingly inconsistent effects of lexical ambiguity are, in fact, a systematic manifestation of the specific dynamics that arise as a consequence of the amount of time spent in processing. The model has thus far been tested by prolonging lexical decision and comparing homonymous, polysemous, and unambiguous words in a factorial design. Here, we kept the strategy of task manipulation but tested the model by using continuous measures as indices of the level of lexical ambiguity and their slopes as indices of the effect size. We expressed the size of the polysemy effect as the slope of the effect of entropy of sense probability distribution and the size of the homonymy effect as the redundancy of sense probability distribution. Comparing lexical decision tasks with the shorter and longer time spent in processing, we observed the predicted decrease in the effect of the polysemy level as well as the predicted increase in the effect of homonymy level.

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

This grammar note describes and analyzes the polysemy of the verb saber (‘to know’) in current Spanish. Specifically, it summarizes the values that it presents as a full verb or saber1, with a base meaning of ability or capacity (Juan sabe nadar), and as a double auxiliary: saber2 or frequent aspectual auxiliary verb equivalent to soler, acostumbrar (Los sillones vacios saben estar ocupados a veces), and saber3 or culminative aspectual auxiliary verb similar to alcanzar, lograr, llegar a (Es un pais que supo ser esplendido). Likewise, the forms it adopts (saber + infinitive), the verb tenses in which it appears registered, and its use as a modal verb are reviewed. Documentation of this use throughout the history of the Spanish language as well as examples in other Romance languages is offered. All this allows us to propose that we are facing a vernacular universal in Spanish., En esta nota gramatical se describe y analiza la polisemia del verbo saber en español actual. En concreto, se resumen los valores que presenta como verbo pleno o saber1, con un significado base de capacidad o habilidad (Juan sabe nadar), y como doble auxiliar: saber2 o auxiliar aspectual frecuentativo equivalente a soler, acostumbrar (Los sillones vacios saben estar ocupados a veces), y saber3 o auxiliar aspectual culminativo semejante a alcanzar, lograr, llegar a (Es un pais que supo ser esplendido). Asimismo, se revisan las formas que adopta (saber + infinitivo), los tiempos verbales en los que aparece registrado y su empleo como verbo modal. Se ofrece documentación de este uso a lo largo de la historia de la lengua espanola, así como ejemplos en otras lenguas romances. Todo ello permite proponer que estamos ante un universal vernáculo del español.

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

This paper studies three Spanish suffixes considered highly polysemous: the verbal suffix -ear, the adjectival suffix -oso, and the nominal suffix -ero. As opposed to the polysemous solution, in which the suffix provides semantic con-tent to derived word, we adopt an explanation based on semantic non-specificity of these three suffixes. In these cases, the base determines the meaning of the complex word, plus other properties such as the argument or event structure of derived verbs. On the other hand, the semantic (non)-specificity of the suffixes is related to other characteristics of the word formation process such as constraints or productivity., Se estudian en este artículo tres sufijos considerados muy polisémicos en español: el sufijo verbal -ear, el sufijo adjetival -oso y el sufijo nominal -ero. Frente a la solución polisémica, en la que el sufijo aporta el significado a la palabra derivada, adoptamos en este trabajo una explicación basada en la inespecificidad semántica de estos tres sufijos. En estos casos, la base determina el significado de la palabra compleja, además de otras propiedades como la estructura argumental o aspectual de los verbos derivados. Por otro lado, la (in)especificidad semántica de los sufijos está relacionada con otras características de los procesos de formación de palabras como las restricciones o la productividad

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

The chorus’ ambiguous characterization plays a critical role in Aristophanes’ "Clouds". It has been noted that the Clouds communicate doubly: at the same time, they state the Weaker Argument openly and the Stronger Argument secretly. This peculiar style mirrors (and mocks) the verbal traps based on polysemy, which Aristoteles recognized as a prominent manipulative tool of sophistic rhetoric ("Rhet." 1404b37-39). This paper deals with interpreting ll. 412-419, exploring the equivocal use of diachronic and synchronic polysemy and of intertextual reference to the Homeric poems. We will argue that the conditional promise of the Clouds is a deliberately ambivalent one. While superficially requiring eristic intellectual faculties and values, they covertly point rather to traditional moral and civic qualities.

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

The Hindu Kush, or the mountain region of northern Pakistan, north-eastern Afghanistan and the northern-most part of the Indian-administered Kashmir region, is home to approximately 50 languages belonging to six different genera: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic and the isolate Burushaski. Areality research on this region is only in its early stages, and while its significance as a convergence area has been suggested by several scholars, only a few, primarily phonological and grammatical, features have been studied in a more systematic fashion. Cross-linguistic research in the realms of semantics and lexical organization has been given considerably less attention. However, preliminary findings indicate that features are geographically bundled with one another, across genera, in significant ways, displaying semantic areality on multiple levels throughout the region or in one or more of its sub-regions. The present study is an areal-typological investigation of kinship terms in the region, in which particular attention is paid to a few notable polysemy patterns and what appears to be a significant geographical clustering of these. Comparisons are made between the geographical distribution of such patterns and those of some other linguistic features as well as with relevant non-linguistic factors related to shared cultural values or identities and a long history of small-scale cross-community interaction in different parts of the region.

El perfil conceptual de sustancia es un modelo que representa la variedad de maneras de hablar y pensar (zonas) sobre este concepto que los individuos socialmente desarrollan y usan en contextos específicos. En este artículo se presentan las zonas que componen el perfil conceptual de sustancia y una propuesta sobre cómo este modelo puede ser utilizado por los docentes para identificar el pensamiento de sus estudiantes y apoyarlos en expandir sus formas de pensar y hablar sobre la sustancia., Conceptual profile of substance is a model that represents the diversity of ways of speaking and thinking (zones) about that concept which individuals socially develop and use in specific contexts. This paper presents the zones that constitute the conceptual profile of substance, and a proposal for how this model of heterogeneity of speech and thinking can be used to identify students’ thinking and support them in extending their ways of speaking and thinking about substance.

The word class preposition contains many highly polysemous members whose meanings may often seem completely unrelated. This project in a close examination of the polysemy network of the German preposition mit in each of the four (documented) major time periods of the language, namely Old High German, Middle High German, Early New High German, and New High German (Penzl 1995). Each of the distinct senses of the preposition is analyzed using Charles Fillmore’s frame semantic approach (Fillmore 1982, Fillmore & Baker 2009, among others) and a visual representation of the polysemy network in each of the time periods is drawn up to show precisely how the senses are related to one another.By using frame semantics as a methodological basis for this undertaking, this work is able to illustrate the motivation behind the changes in the polysemy network diachronically rather than merely appealing to traditional textbook mechanisms of semantic change, such as amelioration, pejoration, synecdoche, etc. (Crowley & Bowern 2010). While these mechanisms are indeed still at work, they do not account for the motivation behind the semantic change. This project aims to offer the field of historical lexical semantics a framework to follow in order to analyze the polysemy network of a word both synchronically and diachronically and to show the motivation behind the semantic changes of that word. This study is organized as follows: In chapter 2, I review traditional, non-cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and illustrate the reasons for which these approaches are ill-suited for the undertaking in this dissertation. Chapter 3 is a discussion of cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and shows the reasons for which I have chosen frame semantics as the theoretical basis for this study. Chapter 4 details the methodology, including discussion of the applicability of frame semantics to this task as well as an overview of the corpora used and the method of data analysis. In chapt

The development of speech is an urgent task of teaching in elementary school. Speech is a way of knowing reality, it performs the functions of communication, emotional self-expression of a person and influence on other people. Speech development contributes to the development of the pupil’s thinking. In this article author describes some possible methods of teaching polysemy to senior pupils.

The article provides an overview of approaches to understanding the phenomenon of polysemy, discusses the interpretation of the concept of lexico-semantic variant and its relationship with the concept of "meaning". The possibilities of an invariant approach to the organization of the meaning of a word are analyzed.

The «lago del cor», which one encounters even before crossing the threshold of the «secret things» of the kingdom of the underworld, can be read and interpreted as a pulcer tropus placed to embellish the opening lines of Dante’s Comedy. And this is certainly true, but the semantic universe that accompanies the image emerges in all its polysemic value as soon as one looks beyond the sphere of tout court literary criticism and explores different scopes that, in spite of the totally modern sectoral approach, they are instead rediscovered as being adjacent and complementary in the figure created by Dante.

In recent years, we have witnessed a steady growth of linguistic information represented and exposed as linked data on the Web. Such linguistic linked data have stimulated the development and use of openly available linguistic knowledge graphs, as is the case with the Apertium RDF, a collection of interconnected bilingual dictionaries represented and accessible through Semantic Web standards. In this work, we explore techniques that exploit the graph nature of bilingual dictionaries to automatically infer new links (translations). We build upon a cycle density based method: partitioning the graph into biconnected components for a speed-up, and simplifying the pipeline through a careful structural analysis that reduces hyperparameter tuning requirements. We also analyse the shortcomings of traditional evaluation metrics used for translation inference and propose to complement them with new ones, both-word precision (BWP) and both-word recall (BWR), aimed at being more informative of algorithmic improvements. Over twenty-seven language pairs, our algorithm produces dictionaries about 70% the size of existing Apertium RDF dictionaries at a high BWP of 85% from scratch within a minute. Human evaluation shows that 78% of the additional translations generated for dictionary enrichment are correct as well. We further describe an interesting use-case: inferring synonyms within a single language, on which our initial human-based evaluation shows an average accuracy of 84%. We release our tool as free/open-source software which can not only be applied to RDF data and Apertium dictionaries, but is also easily usable for other formats and communities.

In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called concreteness ratings. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology.

This paper explores a taxonomy of uses of 'because' from the linguistics literature. It traces the apparent semantic differences between content, epistemic, and act 'because' to differences in attachment height. But it argues that the fact that these uses of 'because' never occur in the same environments is evidence of an underlying semantic unity. Arguments from such a distribution to underlying unity are familiar from phonology and morphology, and they are implicit in Quine's comments on ambiguity in Word and Object, but they have too rarely been deployed in semantics. Here, such an argument points the way towards an underexplored conception of polysemy, while also making progress on the rather more limited topic of the lexical semantics of 'because'.

This study aims to investigate to what extent Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English understand the meanings of polysemous words and whether puns can be used to teach such words. A test and two questionnaires were constructed to retrieve data from both students and teachers. The results of the study show that Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English generally have an acceptable knowledge of polysemous words, but that the students’ comprehension depends on the program they attend. Based on these results, it was also concluded that puns can be used to teach students about the meanings of polysemous words. The results of the questionnaires display that students in general have a positive attitude towards using puns in the classroom, and that they find them entertaining and humorous. In addition, the students also saw this approach as beneficial to their motivation and retention. Lastly, the teachers expressed that using humor can strengthen the learning process, and if the students find the teaching situation enjoyable, they learn faster, and their retention is thus increased. © 2022 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.

The «lago del cor», which one encounters even before crossing the threshold of the «secret things» of the kingdom of the underworld, can be read and interpreted as a pulcer tropus placed to embellish the opening lines of Dante’s Comedy. And this is certainly true, but the semantic universe that accompanies the image emerges in all its polysemic value as soon as one looks beyond the sphere of tout court literary criticism and explores different scopes that, in spite of the totally modern sectoral approach, they are instead rediscovered as being adjacent and complementary in the figure created by Dante.

The article provides an overview of approaches to understanding the phenomenon of polysemy, discusses the interpretation of the concept of lexico-semantic variant and its relationship with the concept of "meaning". The possibilities of an invariant approach to the organization of the meaning of a word are analyzed.

The development of speech is an urgent task of teaching in elementary school. Speech is a way of knowing reality, it performs the functions of communication, emotional self-expression of a person and influence on other people. Speech development contributes to the development of the pupil’s thinking. In this article author describes some possible methods of teaching polysemy to senior pupils.

The paper explores the meaning and use of ugly in English. The study is based on corpus data from Cobuild Wordbanks Online and investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of the concept. Through corpus analysis methodology, we investigate the most common collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of the term. Based on this analysis, our study proposes semantic explications of ugly in universal human concepts within the theoretical framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). We also analyze the most common collocations with the word ugly and classify them into several meaning-based categories. A comparison between beautiful and ugly reveals that they are not identical in their distribution, which suggests different cognitive salience of the concepts. We also note the special role of ‘people’ and ‘nature’ in conceptualization and use of beautiful and that of ‘human actions’ in ugly.

The paper studies the semantics of four Russian key terms of aesthetic evaluation: krasivyj ‘beautiful’, prekrasnyj ‘beautiful/fine’, nekrasivyj ’ugly/plain’ and bezobraznyj ‘ugly/frightful’. It demonstrates different patterns of polysemy of the words and the nuances of meaning. Following the framework of folk aesthetics and cultural semantics, the meanings of the terms in question are represented using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and are shown to relate to Russian cultural themes. The analysis demonstrates cultural significance of aesthetic value in Russian and its intrinsic link with ethics, morality and politeness.

This dissertation asks how we should understand the distinction between semantic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic understanding within the framework of mentalism, on which the study of language is a branch of psychology. In particular, I assess a proposal on which the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is ultimately grounded in the modularity or encapsulation of semantic processes. While pragmatic processes involved in understanding the communicative intentions of a speaker are non-modular and highly inferential, semantic processes involved in understanding the meaning of an expression are modular and encapsulated from top-down influences of general cognition. The encapsulation hypothesis for semantics is attractive, since it would allow the semantics-pragmatics distinction to cut a natural joint in the communicating mind. However, as I argue, the case in favor of the modularity hypothesis for semantics is not particularly strong. Many of the arguments offered in its support are unsuccessful. I therefore carefully assess the relevant experimental record, in rapport with parallel debates about modular processing in other domains, such as vision. I point to several observations that raise a challenge for the encapsulation hypothesis for semantics; and I recommend consideration of alternative notions of modularity. However, I also demonstrate some principled strategies that proponents of the encapsulation hypothesis might deploy in order to meet the empirical challenge that I raise. I conclude that the available data neither falsify nor support the modularity hypothesis for semantics, and accordingly I develop several strategies that might be pursued in future work. It has also been argued that the encapsulation of semantic processing would entail (or otherwise strongly recommend) a particular approach to word meaning. However, in rapport with the literature on polysemy—a phenomenon whereby a single word can be used to express several related concepts, but

In this paper, we demonstrate the effects of Information Theory measures on the processing of polysemous nouns and reveal that the sensitivity to multiple related senses can be learned from the linguistic context. We collected large-scale data and applied a correlation design to show that an increase in sense uncertainty (or sense diversity) is followed by a faster visual lexical decision. The facilitatory effect of sense uncertainty was revealed by the predictive power of entropy, followed by the additional analysis, which revealed that both the number of senses and the balance of sense probabilities affected processing. For the first time, the balance of sense probabilities was described via redundancy to demonstrate the effect of the numerical description of the balance of sense probabilities. Finally, we crossed distribution semantics and discrimination learning to show that polysemy effects can arise as a consequence of the principles of error-driven learning.

The main speech of the article as in the terminology in the signs is polysemy and synonymy, which makes them negative.

The author of the article describes etymological and semantic criteria in polysemy and homonymy. As we know, two or more words identical in sound and spelling but different in meaning, distribution and (in many cases) origin are called homonyms. The examples of homonyms are given in this article in three languages (English, Uzbek and Russian languages)

Babelfy is an online tool, developed in the context of Natural Language Processing. When an item with more than one meaning is introduced in Babelfy, it chooses the appropriate meaning considering the context. The objective of this research study is to test the Word Sense Disambiguation skills of Babelfy in Spanish from a linguistic approach. To do so, a descriptive and comparative study between Babelfy and native Spanish speakers was carried out. Twenty-two pairs of sentences with an ambiguous word were designed, the first sentence of the pair had a neutral context and the second one a facilitating context. These sentence-pairs were introduced in Babelfy to check which meaning of the ambiguous word was selected and to explore whether there were differences depending on the type of context. These results were then compared to the answers of sixty-two Spanish native speakers. The data show that the behaviour of speakers when encountering an ambiguous word is not equivalent to the way Babelfy performs Word Sense Disambiguation, especially when the context is neutral, and the word has related meanings., Babelfy es una herramienta online, desarrollada en el marco del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. Cuando un ítem con más de un significado se introduce, éste escoge el significado adecuado teniendo en cuenta el contexto. El objetivo de esta investigación es poner a prueba las habilidades de desambiguación de significados de Babelfy en español desde un punto de vista lingüístico. Para ello, se llevó a cabo un estudio descriptivo y comparativo entre Babelfy y hablantes nativos del español. Se diseñaron veintidós parejas de oraciones con palabras ambiguas, una con contexto neutro y otra con contexto facilitador. Estas parejas fueron introducidas en Babelfy para comprobar qué significado de la palabra ambigua era seleccionado y para observar si existían diferencias en la desambiguación dependiendo del tipo de contexto. Estos resultados se compararon con las respuestas de sesenta y dos hablantes nativos de español. Los datos muestran que el comportamiento de los hablantes al encontrarse con palabras ambiguas no es equivalente a la manera en que Babelfy produce la desambiguación, especialmente cuando el contexto es neutro y la palabra tiene significados relacionados.

The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of polysemy and related semantic relations emerging in prepositions belonging to Aquilan, a dialect of Italian. The data are based on fieldwork research, in which different polysemy tests where used in an experimental setting. Two key results emerged from the study. First, Aquilan prepositions display a degree of polysemy inversely proportional to their morphological complexity, with some prepositions being monosemous (e.g. a, a destra de, ‘ngima a). Second, prepositions’ senses can stand in relations of colexification, partial synonymy, or hyponymy. Colexification holds when related senses become part of a preposition’s sense range; hyponymy and partial synonymy (overlap) when one preposition denotes all or some of the places denoted by a second preposition. The work thus offers a paradigmatic view of the polysemy of Aquilan prepositions that sheds light on seldom attested polysemy patterns, and contributes novel insights on the ongoing debate on this phenomenon.

This paper discusses morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of Portuguese modal verbs. Following the assumptions from Generative Grammar, this case- study approaches two very important issues for the characterization of modal verbs, having to do which concern their both either homonymic or polysemic status. By reanalyzing the “lexical” counterpart of these verbs as well as their “auxiliary” side, the present work claims that there is only a lexical entry for dever and poder and that the properties of their structure and interpretation depend on the syntax, not on the lexicon. Hence, this paper argues for a MODAL category, not as a descriptive label, but as a grammar prime, and shows the both empirical and theoretical consequences of this proposal., Este trabalho discute propriedades morfológicas, sintáticas e semânticas dos verbos modais do português. Seguindo os pressupostos da Gramática Gerativo-Transformacional, este artigo discorre sobre dois problemas bastante caros à caracterização dos verbos modais, que têm a ver com seu estatuto de homônimos ou polissêmicos. Reanalisando o caráter “lexical” desses verbos bem como seu caráter “auxiliar”, este estudo defende que há apenas uma única entrada para dever e poder e que suas propriedades estruturais e interpretativas dependem da sintaxe e não do léxico. Para tanto, este trabalho advoga em favor de uma categoria MODAL, não como rótulo descritivo, mas como primitivo da gramática, e mostra quais as consequências teóricas e empíricas dessa proposta., Este trabajo discute acerca de las propiedades morfológicas, sintácticas y semánticas de los verbos modales del Portugués. Siguiendo las premisas de la Gramática Generativo-Transformacional, este artículo discurre sobre dos problemas muy preciados en la caracterización de los verbos modales, que están relacionados con su condición de homónimos o polisémicos. Reanalizando el carácter “lexical” de esos verbos así como su carácter “auxiliar”, este estudio sostiene que hay solamente una entrada para deber y poder y sus propiedades estructurales ye interpretativas dependen de la sintaxis y no del léxico. Para ello, en este se aboga por una categoría MODAL en esta, categoría no como término descriptivo, sino como primitivo de la gramática, además de presentar cuáles son las consecuencias teóricas y empíricas de esta propuesta.

This paper investigates the meanings of the prefix "des" in action nouns in Brazilian Portuguese through an approach to the language in use and focuses on the importance of context for the recognition of the meaning being activated by the affix. Initially, the main contributions of the Normative Grammatical Tradition and the Theory of Generative Linguistics to the analysis of the referred prefix are presented. The corpus used in this research was constituted from the electronic mega-corpus NILC of the University of São Paulo developed on the São Carlos campus. The results of the data analysis reveal that the meaning of the affix “des-” in the language in use is highly influenced by the context, therefore it is possible for the same word to have different meanings, depending on whether it is in different situations of use., Este trabalho investiga as acepções do prefixo “des” em substantivos de ação no Português Brasileiro por meio de uma abordagem da língua em uso e focaliza a importância do contexto para o reconhecimento do sentido que está sendo ativado pelo afixo. Inicialmente, são apresentadas as principais contribuições da Tradição Gramatical Normativa e da Teoria da Linguística Gerativa para a análise do referido prefixo. O corpus utilizado nesta pesquisa foi constituído a partir do mega-corpus eletrônico NILC da Universidade de São Paulo do campus de São Carlos. Os resultados da análise de dados revelam que a acepção do afixo “des-” na língua em uso é altamente influenciada pelo contexto, de maneira que é possível uma mesma palavra possuir sentidos diferentes, conforme esteja em diferentes situações de uso.

I consider a problem that arises in connection with (alleged) cases of coincident objects (such as a statue and the lump of clay it is made of) and that affects the two main accounts that have been given of such cases, namely, Pluralism (according to which statue and lump are distinct) and Monism (according to which they are one). The problem is that both views seem committed to accepting strained interpretations of some of the statements used to describe the situation. I consider Pickel’s arguments against the Pluralist’s strategy of interpreting ‘is’ as expressing constitution in sentences such as ‘The statue is the lump of clay’, and provide reasons for rejecting them—so as to vindicate, eventually, the Pluralist position.

First published: 21 May 2021, Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses —is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word’s meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

El manejo cotidiano de los términos sostenible y sustentable en el discurso político, económico y social inició en los años ochenta del siglo XX. Desde ese momento hasta el día de hoy, diversos esfuerzos para alcanzar la sustentabilidad se han diluido en función de las múltiples interpretaciones antrópicas que han surgido alrededor del concepto. Lo anterior se considera un problema, ya que la falta de homogeneidad semántica constituye uno de los factores que han dificultado la concreción acertada de la sustentabilidad. El presente texto utiliza el análisis bibliográfico como principal herramienta metodológica para abordar de forma teórica el tema desde la perspectiva histórica de la polisemia del concepto. El artículo respalda la hipótesis de que, para lograr la sustentabilidad de cualquiera de las esferas antrópicas, es fundamental propiciar primeramente la sustentabilidad del entorno natural con el que todavía contamos., The everyday use of the term sustainable in the political, economic and social discourse began in the eighty’s decade of the twentieth century. From that moment to the present day, various efforts to achieve sustainability have been diluted due to the multiple anthropic interpretations that have emerged around the concept. This is considered a problem, since the lack of semantic homogeneity is one of the factors that have hindered the successful realization of sustainability. This text uses bibliographic analysis as the main methodological tool to approach, in a theoretical manner, the subject from the historical perspective of the polysemy of the concept. The article supports the hypothesis that, in order to achieve sustainability in any of the anthropic spheres, it is essential to first promote the sustainability of the natural environment we still have.

Las vinculaciones semánticas entre palabras aparentemente próximas y entre sus significantes y sus significados son objeto de infinidad de estudios que tratan de resolver sus complicaciones y dificultades. Sin embargo, existe un sorprendente vacío científico en torno a la cuestión de lo que denominamos antisemia, por el hecho de tratarse de voces polisémicas que son capaces de contener simultáneamente un significado y su contrario, lo que supone un verdadero problema para aprendices y profesionales de la traducción, entre otras razones por la ausencia de herramientas semánticas que ayuden a establecer el valor correcto en cada contexto. Este trabajo se centra en el análisis del concepto de antisemia, así como de ejemplos existentes en español, de su presencia en contextos de mayor o menor frecuencia, y de las opciones de resolución de comprensión y traducción, especialmente para los profesionales de la traducción., Semantic linkages between apparently upcoming words and their meanings and their meanings are the subject of countless studies that try to resolve their complications and difficulties. However, there is a surprising scientific void around the question of what we call antisemia, by the fact of polysemic voices that are able to contain at the same time a meaning and its opposite, which is a real problem for apprentices and translation professionals, among other reasons due to the absence of semantic tools that help to establish the correct value in every context. This paper focuses on the analysis of the concept of antisemia, as well as some existing examples in Spanish, of his presence in contexts and situations of greater or lesser frequency, and resolution options of comprehension and translation, especially for translation professionals.

I consider a problem that arises in connection with (alleged) cases of coincident objects (such as a statue and the lump of clay it is made of) and that affects the two main accounts that have been given of such cases, namely, Pluralism (according to which statue and lump are distinct) and Monism (according to which they are one). The problem is that both views seem committed to accepting strained interpretations of some of the statements used to describe the situation. I consider Pickel’s arguments against the Pluralist’s strategy of interpreting ‘is’ as expressing constitution in sentences such as ‘The statue is the lump of clay’, and provide reasons for rejecting them—so as to vindicate, eventually, the Pluralist position.

First published: 21 May 2021, Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses —is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word’s meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network, La composicionalidad es sin duda uno de los problemas más difíciles de la lingüística. En las teorías de decodificación, el hablante desempeña el papel principal, siendo el responsable de la construcción específica del mensaje y teniendo que elegir con cuidado cuál es la forma que mejor codifica el significado que se desea comunicar. En las teorías inferenciales, la carga se desplaza de hablante a oyente y es este último el que debe realizar una serie de inferencias para cruzar la brecha entre lo que se dice y el significado que se pretende comunicar. En este artículo, sostengo que el significado construccional puede servir como un nivel medio útil para el establecimiento del significado oracional, proporcionando un andamiaje que puede usarse para seleccionar entre las muchas facetas del significado de las palabras, facilitando de esta manera las operaciones de interpretación necesarias para la construcción del significado. Presento aquí una red polisémica de los sentidos asociados con la construcción gramatical [from X to Y], que se analiza utilizando ejemplos de un corpus multimodal. También se incluye un análisis preliminar del comportamiento gestual asociado con los diferentes sentidos propuestos, que puede verse como una contribución a la caracterización de los distintos sentidos de la red polisémica