The next speaker in our English Language and Linguistics research seminar series is Professor Robyn Carston from University College London
The talk’s title is Polysemy, Pragmatics and Word Meaning. There’s an abstract below.
Time: 12noon to 1pm, Wednesday 19 February 2025
Place: Sandyford 417, City Campus, Northumbria University
Also online: email Billy Clark to join online: billy.clark@northumbria.ac.uk
Directions and campus map: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-campuses/newcastle-city-campus
Abstract:
Polysemy occurs when a single linguistic expression has multiple related senses (e.g. ‘run’ in ‘run a mile’ vs ‘run a company’) and is to be distinguished from homonymy, where two expressions are identical phonologically but have unrelated meanings (e.g. ‘coach’ meaning instructor and ‘coach’ meaning large bus). Psycholinguistic experiments show that the two phenomena have quite different processing profiles. My main claim is that the origin of polysemy (but not homonymy) is pragmatic, a consequence of the prevalence of highly context-sensitive modulations of word meanings in communication. Many of these modulations are one-off or transient occurrences, but some recur and may become established meanings of a word, hence stored in the mental lexicon as members of a family (or network) of related meanings.
Northumbria Englishes 