Regular vs Irregular polysemy

Question

I'm having trouble understanding the difference between regular and irregular polysemy. May someone give an example?

Answer 1

In general, polysemy describes a word having two or more related meanings or senses. Regular polysemy tends to involve a relationship between two senses of the word that would be generalizable to many other words. Usually this is a kind of metonymy, like (adapting from Robyn Carston, "Polysemy: Pragmatics and Sense Conventions," Mind and Language, 36.1, 2021):

• container/contents ("he drank the whole bottle"; bottle is literally a container but is here understood as referring to the contents of the bottle)

• material/artefact ("chalk" is both a material and a tool someone writes with; "paper" is both a material and a sheet of paper)

• object/information (there is a physical object called a "book" and the text or information described by "book")

• creator/work ("I've read Dickens" or "I drive a Honda")

• place/event ("Waterloo": am I referring to the place or the famous battle?)

Each of these patterns is regular, as I can take that pattern and find it in many words. (Container/contents: I smoked a whole carton; I ate a whole plate; I dumped the whole tank.)

Irregular polysemy involves a metaphorical process that is not easily regularized. The two meanings are still related (or it would be homonymy, e.g., bear as the animal and bear meaning to carry), but that pattern cannot be applied to groups of words. For instance:

• a dream can be both something we experience while we sleep and a more metaphorical aspiration: "I had a dream last night" v. "I dream of being an acrobat." The two senses are related, but not in a regular way.

• oil is both a lubricant for engines and the like and a fatty substance used in cooking. They both have some qualities in common (slipperiness) but the relation between the two is not generalizable.

In other words, the two words are related in an idiosyncratic way, a way specific to the word.

Answer 2

A "regular" phenomenon is one that is predictable by rule. "Polysemy" is the phenomenon of one word having multiple meanings. So "regular polysemy" occurs when a word has multiple meanings, but they are predictable by rule: there are many other words that work analogously.

"Irregular polysemy", then, refers to cases where they is not a widely-applicable rule.

In practice there's a lot of grey area or vagueness left. As with most if not all "rules" in language there are exceptions, so "regular" really means "pretty regular".

This leaves open the question of how to decide whether two things are "the same word" or "different words". Is it spelling? Pronunciation? Historical origin?

And after that, how do we decide whether two things "mean the same"?

"Regular polysemy in WordNet" (Lucie Barque and François Régis Chaumartin, https://www.proxem.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/04_BarqueChaumartin_GSCL_2008.pdf) reports exploration of "regular polysemy" using a large database of words and word-senses, called "WordNet". The authors quote J. Apresjan's definition:

Polysemy of a word A with the meaning ai and aj is called
regular if, in the given language, there exists at least 
one other word B with the meaning bi and bj , which are 
semantically distinguished from each other in exactly the same
way as ai and aj and if ai and bi, aj and bj are non-synonymous.”

They give the nice example of fruit names being used as colors -- there's the obvious case of "orange", but you can use almost any fruit (and many other) names to refer to colors:

a chestnut mare
heat the metal to a dull cherry
I had my car painted grape
visit the emerald city
...

Of course, fruits that come in varying colors (say, apples) don't work so well. And some fruits we don't tend to use that way though presumably we could (say, pear).

They also give the example of using container names to refer to the amount they hold:

a bowl of rice
a spoon of flour
a glass of water
a barrel of oil

Many names for things can be used as verbs referring to the action typically done involving them:

dust the shelves
book a reservation
bus kids to school
pencil in that appointment
can you read this paper? (or papyrus)

Of course there are countless other cases, depending on how widely-applicable you want a rule to be, and how different the meanings.