On irregular polysemy* Gergely Pethő

2.2.2. Second example: the polysemy ‘body part’ – ‘part of clothing that covers
it’
Our second example will illustrate that a previously presumably productive polysemy
type that could be derived by a shifting rule can “fall apart” because several words belonging
to it are lexicalised for a more specific, non-predictable use. This may have
happened with the polysemy ‘body part’ – ‘part of clothing that covers it’ in Hungarian,
which may have been productive.
Words that belong to this polysemy type behave in a way that can be derived by
an appropriate shifting rule that conforms to the following schema:
(11) M BACK = BODY PART (x) & ...
⇒ M BACK, PART OF CLOTHING = λy ∃x ∃z [CLOTHING (x) & PART (y, x) & COVER (y, z)
& BODY PART (z) & ...]
The following examples behave accordingly: shoulder of a coat/a shirt ‘part covering
a shoulder’, fingers of a glove ‘parts covering the fingers’, back of a dress ‘part covering
the back’, leg of trousers ‘part covering a leg’ etc.
In Hungarian, the exact equivalents of many of these expressions also exist. But
in case we try to describe this by a rule like (11) and assume that the condition of its
use is that it can apply to body part terms if the appropriate body part is covered by
some part of clothing, we find that the variation does not strictly work this way. The
sleeve of a shirt/coat etc. is called kabát/ing ujja, literally ‘finger of a coat/shirt’, and
there are several body part terms that are used metaphorically instead of metonymically,
e.g. cipő orra ‘tip of a shoe’, literally ‘nose of a shoe’, cipő nyelve ‘tongue of a
shoe’. On the other hand, and more importantly, it is somewhat arbitrary what body
part terms can be used to name which parts of clothes. The expression zokni ujja ‘finger
of a sock’ is not possible, and although nadrág dereka ‘waist of trousers’ can be
used, nadrág csípője ‘hip of trousers’ or nadrág térde ‘knee of trousers’ is less possible
(although there are differences among the speakers as to which of these forms they
would accept). Also, kabát feje ‘head of a coat’ with the meaning ‘hood’ is impossible,
although this can arguably be explained by the existence of the lexical item kapucni
‘hood’ and the elsewhere condition. The problem is not just that the general condition
for the use of (11) mentioned above is incorrect, but it does not seem to be possible to
provide such conditions that would correctly describe the data but not simply enumerate
the lexemes to which it can apply. Because therefore condition b) of (P1) is violated,
it is not justified to talk about rule application in this case.
There seem to be two ways to explain how it is possible that polysemy phenomena
that seem to be straightforwardly describable by shifting rules are nevertheless not
productive and not systematic. It can be useful to review these possibilities, as they can
lead to interesting conclusions as to what shifting rules really are. The first possibility
was mentioned at the beginning of this subsection: a given meaning variation that
seems to be systematic at first sight was caused by an existing active shifting rule in an
earlier state of the language, and the meaning variation was truly systematic and productive
back then. However, this systematicity was disturbed, and as a consequence
the rule disappeared from the language. Those words that exhibit this at least
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