Justyna Wieczorek

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data.1 In the first part, we equip readers with background knowledge on different psycholinguistic views on polysemy and we introduce the basic spectrum of sense remoteness proposed in earlier literature. We also present the methodology of our research and we report the results of our quantitative study based on a large sample of sense pairs randomly extracted from plWordNet This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data.1 In the first part, we equip readers with background knowledge on different psycholinguistic views on polysemy and we introduce the basic spectrum of sense remoteness proposed in earlier literature. We also present the methodology of our research and we report the results of our quantitative study based on a large sample of sense pairs randomly extracted from plWordNet  (Słowosieć) thanks to the resources received from the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Center (the Polish section of the European research infrastructure CLARIN ERIC). We show that the most widely represented polysemy types are nested polysemy, polysemy by metaphor and polysemy by metonymy. The second part proposes an extended spectrum of sense remoteness and presents insights on different types of polysemy included in this spectrum with a special attention paid to nested polysemy. 

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data. In the second part, we show that polysemy is not a stable phenomenon and relations between senses may differ across language users. For instance, our fifty-fifty class or borderline cases may be represented differently by different language users depending on their perception of the world, world knowledge, associations. We point to some parameters of variation in the class of polysemy by metonymy and polysemy by metaphor which may affect their sense remoteness and consequently also the way they are represented in the mental lexicon.