On irregular polysemy* Gergely Pethő

Thus such designations do not help at all to understand the objects in question.
They are based on superficial similarities, which should be distinguished from more
interesting structural resemblances (cf. e.g. Medin & Gentner 1998’s distinction between
mere-appearance similarities and analogies). If one tries to think about the
“metaphorically” designated object in terms of the “literally” designated one, the same
problem crucially appears that was noted by Murphy (1996) in connection with conceptual
metaphors, i.e. that this leads to incorrect conclusions about the “metaphorically”
named object. So in order not to derive false assumptions spontaneously, e.g. that
the ball should stay in the basket if thrown into it or that fish fingers contain a bone,
speakers have to be aware that they must not derive any conclusions from the metaphorically
motivated names in question about the object named. Thus it is highly unlikely
that such metaphoric transfers could play any role at all in concept formation
and reasoning, but rather can only serve a communicative function, namely, the satisfaction
of the communicative need of naming the objects in question by using an already
available expression, cf. 2.4.3.
3. Summary
I believe that the case studies above confirm that the lack of interest toward non-systematic
polysemy phenomena in the literature is undeserved, because they can potentially
lead to similarly interesting theoretical conclusions as systematic polysemy phenomena.
We have seen that the propositions (P4) and (P5), which are mostly taken for
granted in the literature, are not true without further qualifications, and thus a strong
interpretation of (P2), which is also commonplace, is incorrect. In particular, polysemies
that can be derived by focussing rule are potentially always systematic, but this
potential is not always actually exploited, and it is therefore sometimes the case that
only a single lexeme exhibits a meaning variation of a certain type. On the other hand,
groups of lexemes that have lost their systematicity or have arisen from convergent
processes of analogy can be mistaken for systematic polysemy phenomena that can be
described by shifting rules. Note that being able to be described by rules does not
imply that these meaning variations are in fact derived in the minds of the speakers instead
of being simply stored in and retrieved from the lexicon (which Murphy, this
volume, claims to be the case in most non-creative uses of polysemous words). However,
on the other hand, the reverse is in fact true: if some variation cannot even be described
by rules, because it is not systematic enough, one can safely assume that it is
stored in the lexicon. One of the substantial morals of the thoughts laid out in this
paper is that careful attention must be paid to whether some semantic variation is truly
or just superficially systematic when one is planning experiments that aim to examine
the mental representation of different types of polysemy.
In section 2.2 we have seen that from a metonymically motivated meaning variation
we cannot automatically infer that the variation is based on a rule, i.e. that the
meanings in question are not simply lexically stored. And in section 2.1 I argued that
there is no necessary theoretical difference between a meaning variation that appears
only with a single word and one that can be observed in connection with several
32