Cruse (1986; 2000) distinguishes between established vs. non-established senses. An established sense is one that is permanently stored in the speaker’s mental lexicon, one which is always available; these are the senses that would normally be listed in a dictionary. A lexically ambiguous word is one that has two or more established senses.
We have seen how context determines a choice between existing (i.e., established) senses of lexically ambiguous words. But context can also force the hearer to “invent” a new, non-established sense for a word. When Mark Twain described a certain person as “a good man in the worst sense of the word,” his hearers were forced to interpret the word good with something close to the opposite of its normal meaning (e.g., puritanical, self-righteous, or judgmental). Clearly this “sense” of the word good is not permanently stored in the hearer’s mental lexicon, and we would not expect to see it listed in a dictionary entry for good. It exists only on the occasion of its use in this specific context.
A general term for the process by which context creates non-established senses is coercion.30 Coercion provides a mechanism for extending the range of meanings of a given word. It is motivated by the assumption that the speaker intends to communicate something intelligible, relevant to current purposes, etc. If none of the established senses of a word allow for a coherent or intelligible sentence meaning, the hearer tries to create an extended meaning for one or more words that makes sense in the current speech context.
Coerced meanings are not stored in the lexicon, but are calculated as needed from the established or default meaning of the word plus contextual factors; so there is generally some identifiable relationship between the basic and extended senses. Several common patterns of extended meaning were identified and named by ancient Greek philosophers; these are often referred to as tropes, or “figures of speech”.
5.4.1 Figurative senses
Some of the best-known figures of speech are listed in (18):
(18) Some well-known tropes
Metaphor: Traditionally defined as a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things; but see comments below.
Hyperbole: A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect; an extravagant statement. (e.g., I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice. — Chinese saying implying seniority in age and wisdom)
Euphemism: Substitution of an inoffensive term (such as passed away) for one considered offensively explicit (died).
Metonymy: A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated (such as crown for monarch).
Synecdoche (/sɪˈnɛk də ki/): A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole, the whole for a part, the specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for the thing made from it. Considered by some to be a form of metonymy.
Litotes: A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite (e.g. not bad to mean ‘good’).
Irony: A figure of speech in which the intended meaning of the expression is the opposite of its literal meaning.
The question of how metaphors work has generated an enormous body of literature, and remains a topic of controversy. For our present purposes, it is enough to recognize all of these figures of speech as patterns of reasoning that will allow a hearer to provide an extended sense when all available established senses fail to produce an acceptable interpretation of the speaker’s utterance.
5.4.2 How figurative senses become established
As mentioned above, figurative senses are not stored in the speaker/hearer’s mental lexicon; rather, they are calculated as needed, when required by the context of use. However, some figurative senses become popular, and after frequent repetition they lose the sense of freshness or novelty associated with their original use; we call such expressions “clichés”. At this stage they are remembered, rather than calculated, but are perhaps not stored in the lexicon in the same way as “normal” lexical items; they are still felt to be figurative rather than established senses. Probable examples of this type include: fishing for compliments, sowing seeds of doubt, at the end of the day, burning the candle at both ends, boots on the ground, lash out, …
At some point, these frequently used figurative senses may become lexicalized, and begin to function as established senses. For example, the original sense of grasp is ‘to hold in the hand’; but a new sense has developed from a metaphorical use of the word to mean ‘understand’. Similar examples include freeze ‘become ice’ > ‘remain motionless’; broadcast ‘plant (seeds) by scattering widely’ > ‘transmit via radio or television’; and, more recently, the use of hawk and dove to refer to advocates of war and advocates of peace, respectively. Once this stage is reached, the hearer does not have to calculate the speaker’s intended meaning based on specific contextual or cultural factors; the intended meaning is simply selected from among the established senses already available, as with normal cases of lexical ambiguity.
When established senses develop out of metaphors they are referred to as conventional metaphors, in contrast to “novel” or “creative” metaphors which are newly created. Conventional metaphors are sometimes referred to as “dead” or “frozen” metaphors, phrases which are themselves conventional metaphors expressing the intuition that the meaning of such expressions is static rather than dynamic.
Finally, in some cases the original “literal” sense of a word may fall out of use, leaving what was originally a figurative sense as the only sense of that word. This seems to be happening with the compound noun night owl, which originally referred to a type of bird. Many current dictionaries (including the massive Random House Unabridged) now list only the conventional metaphor sense, i.e., a person who habitually stays out late at night.
This discussion shows how figurative senses may lead to polysemy.31 Earlier we noted that translation equivalents in different languages are unlikely to share the same range of polysemous senses. For example, the closest translation equivalent for grasp in Malay is pĕgang; but this verb never carries the sense of ‘understand’. Novel (i.e., creative) metaphors can sometimes survive and be interpretable when translated into a different language, because the general patterns of meaning extension listed in (18), if they are not universal, are at least used across a wide range of languages. Conventional (i.e., “frozen”) metaphors, however, are much less likely to work in translation, because the specific contextual features which motivated the creative use of the metaphor need no longer be present.
30 This term was coined by Moens & Steedman (1988).
31 Apresjan (1974: 16) makes the interesting observation that semantic extensions based on metonymy frequently lead to systematic polysemy, which he refers to as “regular polysemy”. Polysemy based on metaphorical extension is typically non-systematic.
