Gary,
Now I understand why you were disagreeing with what I said.
I admit that I should have added more explanation in my note
of January 9th. (See below for a complete copy of that note.)
[you claimed] that "The word polyversity implies that there
exists discrete set of meanings,"
No. I said that *formal languages* such as logic have discrete
meanings, but natural languages have a continuous range of meanings.
The words I enclosed in quotation marks are copied directly from
your post. Are you now denying that you wrote them?
I certainly did write and still believe that polyversity *implies*
that there exists a discrete set of meanings or senses for each word.
I realize that you intended to apply that word to natural languages.
But as Dan Everett said, most linguists would reject polylogy.
Therefore, they would reject polyversity, which assumes polylogy.
Dan
Most linguists would reject polylogy because there are no two
words with the same meaning in practice. If they did use such
a word it would be synonomy
Dan's point is what Adam Kilgarriff explained in detail. I also
cited my natlog.pdf slides, which give more examples and citations.
Those linguists and lexicographers are making the same point
as Dan: exact synonyms don't exist in natural languages.
NL meanings are continuous, and a finite set of word senses,
as listed in a typical dictionary, is a tiny and discrete
selection from a continuous infinity.
In any specific context, the meaning of a particular word is
just one selection from a continuous infinity. The probability
that it exactly matches something in a finite set of previous
selections is zero (except for special cases in math and science).
John
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] "I don't believe in word senses."
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2018 17:43:03 -0500
From: John F Sowa <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Gary,
I just read your article. Peirce, Kilgarriff, Atkins, and I would
not agree with the following claim:
I dealt with polysemy extensively in /Turning Signs/ — and went
beyond it in Chapter 2 (http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/dlg.htm)
by coining the word “polyversity” to include not only polysemy
(the tendency of a word to have various meanings) but also the
tendency of a meaning to be expressible in various linguistic signs.
The word polyversity implies that there exists a discrete set of
meanings (at most countably infinite). That is inconsistent with
Peirce's writings about continuity and about the many ways that
"meanings grow".
The claim that meanings are discrete implies that it would be
possible to assign a discrete set of word senses to each word or
phrase of a language. That is inconsistent with the issues raised
and analyzed by the lexicographers Sue Atkins and Adam Kilgarriff:
https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/I_dont_believe_1997.pdf
Since Peirce had extensive experience in lexicography, I'm sure
that he experienced similar issues. If you don't have the time to
read Kilgarriff's article, you might flip through some slides that
illustrate the kinds of issues that must be addressed:
http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf
That file has 101 slides. But slides 4 to 20 are sufficient
to show why the range of meanings must be continuous:
Slides 4 & 5: A brief summary of issues about natural languages.
Slides 6 to 17: A dozen examples selected from articles by various
linguists, philosophers, computational linguists, and myself.
Slide 18: A one-page summary of Kilgarriff's article.
Slides 19 & 20: Examples of the "microsenses" or small variations
in word senses that result from the continuous variations in the
context of any text and the background knowledge of any speaker.
John
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