Ambiguity

Feb 29, 2008 at 9:05 AM
2 comments

On the test yesterday I don't know if I was right when I was doing the test for homonyms and polysemy.

"She was at the head of her class" "She was born with a full head of hair"

Does X Mean Y in some context and Z in others? Yes head in the first case means "top" of class and in the second sentence it means "body part"

Does X only mean Y? NO

Are Y Z related? NO- this means that they are homonyms

Does X mean YZ? No

Both of these heads are homonyms

2 comments

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'head' and 'head' are related. The original sense is the body part, while the extended metaphorical sense of 'chief, top, etc' came from this original meaning: the head is the 'top' bodypart and, arguably, the one given the most importance in day to day interaction. The 'head' is the brains of the operation, if you will. So they are polysemes. A good way to test is to see if you can make a zeumatic sentence with head pulling semantic double duty... but this is a tough one for that. Maybe: She was the head of her class and the two-person horse costume?

I think your tests were correct. I agree with Andrew that "head" and "head" share a relation. I didn't do tests like that on the exam, so that helped me understand the tests. I think the head of her class and the two-person horse costume is a better relation between them.

Ambiguity

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