Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 20
nervous systems, the lexical form vertebrate refers to an enormous variety of mammals,
birds, and shes and central nervous system to a corresponding variety of things inside
them, but both of them are monosemous. Nor are their senses particularly fuzzy; for the
vast majority of animals in the world, virtually every biologist will agree on their status as
vertebrate or invertebrate.
If a word form is ambiguous in a given context, the question as to whether wehavea
case of polysemyorhomonymy depends on whether the two senses are related. Traditionally,
this has been considered to depend on whether one of the two senses is historically derived
from the other (avoiding for the moment cases with more than two senses); this is in accord
with another popular cognitive model of the lexicon, which states that words have meanings
\in perpetuity". Thus, if one wants to determine, what a Latinate English word means, for
example, one should nd out what the corresponding Latin word (if any!) or its component
morphemes would have meant to Cicero. Although the idea is seldom stated so baldly, itis
not uncommon to hear people saying things like \Sympathy really means the same thing as
compassion, they both mean `feeling with' somebody else", or \The root meaning of senator
is `old man' ". Of course this is contrary to the division of linguistics into diachronic and
synchronic; if homonymy is to be de ned in terms of semantic unrelatedness, then we must
mean \in the minds of present-day speakers of the language".
Paradoxically, for those speakers who believe in the unchanging meanings of lin-
guistic forms down through the centuries, the more they learn about the etymology of forms
which had a common origin but have diverged greatly in semantics, the more likely they are
to think of them as related! There is also a constant tendency to construct folk etymologies
that will \explain" perceived relations among senses, whether they bear any relation to
historical fact or not.
This holds even for some parade-ground examples of homonymy. The two lexical
units bank, asinbank of a river and Bank of America, actually are related historically
(Geeraerts 1994a), and one might say that, to the degree that an individual remembers the
intervening steps in the etymology, the words have become synchronically related for that
person. Of course, only a tiny fraction of the speakers of a language will know about most
such etymological facts, and learning them will usually not a ect peoples' understanding
of the meanings of the words in question, so this process will not have much e ect on the
lexical semantics of the language as a whole.