POLYSEMY


Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. Apolyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings.
 Adjective   : polysemous orpolysemic.In contrast, a one-to-one match between a word and a meaning is called monosemy. According to William Croft, "Monosemy is probably most clearly found in specializedvocabulary dealing with technical topics" (The Handbook of Linguistics, 2003).According to some estimates, more than 40% of English words have more than one meaning. The fact that so many words (orlexemes) are polysemous "shows thatsemantic changes often add meanings to the language without subtracting any" (M. Lynne Murphy, Lexical Meaning, 2010).Polysemy is became from two words, there are poly “many” and sema “sign”. Polysemy is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. It has association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. So, polysemy is the phenomenon of having or being open to several or many meanings.

(http://grammar.about.com/od/il/fl/lexical-meaning-words.htm)


Examples of Polysemy:


Man

1. The human species (i.e., man vs. animal)

2. Males of the human species (i.e., man vs. woman)

3. Adult males of the human species (i.e., man vs. boy)

This example shows the specific polysemy where the same word is used at different levels of a taxonomy. Example
1 contains 2, and 2 contains 3.


Mole
1. a small burrowing mammal

2. consequently, there are several different entities called moles (see the Moledisambiguation page). Although these refer todifferent things, their names derive from 1. :e.g. A Moleburrows for information hoping to go undetected.