This brief post acknowledges Dylan Glynn's contribution to New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics (2009) entitled 'Polysemy, syntax, and variation -- a usage-based method for Cognitive Semantics'. Also, this post mainly deals with the issue of polysemy in relation to Quantitative Multifactorial method and does not cover Glynn's chosen statistical technique of Correspondence Analysis proper.
In the interest of time, this post does not engage in any discussion that could arise from Glynn's contribution but rather serves as a personal log of potentially useful quotations and points that I will investigate at a later stage.
Glynn's contribution provides a thorough overview of the treatment of polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics. Glynn's overall premise in relation to polysemy is:
to conserve the network model but to complement [it] with another method: a corpus-driven quantified and multifactorial method (p.76)Further, Glynn points out that with such multifactorial method inevitably requires to approach polysemy in a non-theoretical fashion:
Such an approach employs a kind of componentional analysis that identifies clusters of features across large numbers of speech events. In other words, rather than analyse the possible meanings of a lexeme, a polysemic network should 'fall out' from an analysis that identifies clusters of the cognitive-functional features of a lexeme's usage. These features do not in any way resemble those of the Structuralist componentional analyses, since they are not based on a hypothetical semantic system, but describe instances of real language usage and are based upon encyclopaedic semantics of that language use in context (p.76)
In relation to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of polysemy, Glynn recognises that the interaction between the schematic and/or morpho-syntactic semantics and lexical semantics is yet to be established. Within a dichotomous CL context where 'one position is that syntactic semantics override lexical semantics' and the other position is that 'there exists a complex interaction between all the various semantic structures in all degrees of schematicity', Glynn makes the working assumption that
syntactic variation affects a polysemy network and that its effect cannot be satisfactorily predicted by positing meaning structure associated with grammatical forms and classes a priori. We must therefore account for this variable as an integral part of semantic description. (...) It means that for a given lemma, or root lexeme, there will be semantic variation depending on its syntagmatic context, in other words, its collocation, grammatical, and even tense or case will necessarily affect the meaning of the item" (p.82)In his approach to polysemy, Glynn treats each lexeme 'as a onomasiological field, or set of parasynonyms' (p.82).
Further reading:
Zelinsky-Wibbelt, C. (1986). An empirically based approach towards a system of semantic features. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 11:7-12
