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Abstract

This chapter explores the psychological basis of lexical ambiguity. We compare three ways of meaning calculation, including meanings listed in dictionaries, meanings provided by human subjects, and meanings analyzed by a linguistic theory. Two experiments were conducted using both Chinese and English data. The results suggest that while the numbers of meanings obtained by different methods are significantly different from one another, they are also significantly correlated. Different ways of meaning calculation produce distinct numbers of meanings, though on a relative scale, words with more meanings tend to have greater numbers of meanings throughout. Dictionary meanings are to be distinguished from meanings obtained from subjects both in content and in numbers. These results are then discussed with regard to their methodological implications for further research on psycho- semantics and semantic change.

@incollection{lin05meaningEstimation,
  author={Chien-Jer Charles Lin and Kathleen Ahrens},
  title={How many meanings does a word have? Meaning estimation in Chinese and English},
  year={2005},
  month={July},
  editor={James W. Minett and William S.-Y. Wang},
  publisher={City University of Hong Kong Press},
  booktitle={Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary Linguistics},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/lin05meaningEstimation.html}
}

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