Introduction

This chapter builds on the title and theme of Apresjan's 1974 paper, Regular Polysemy. Apresjan was concerned merely to define the phenomenon and identify where it occurred. Here, we shall explore how it can be exploited.

Regular polysemy occurs where two or more words each have two senses, and all the words exhibit the same relationship between the two senses. The phenomenon is also called ‘sense extension’ (Copestake & Briscoe, 1991), ‘semantic transfer rules’ (Leech, 1981), ‘lexical implication rules’ (Ostler & Atkins, 1991), or simply ‘lexical rules’. An example, taken direct from a dictionary (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, hereafter LDOCE) is:

In each case, two senses are referred to, one with the ‘bracketed optional part’ included in the definition and the other with it omitted; the relation between the two is the same in both cases.

Recent work on lexical description has stressed the need for the structure of a lexical knowledge base (LKB) to reflect the structure of the lexicon (Atkins & Levin, 1991) and for the LKB to incorporate productive rules, so the rulebound ways in which words may be used are captured without the lexicon needing to list all options for all words (Boguraev & Levin, 1990). These arguments suggest that generalizations regarding regular polysemy should be expressed in the LKB, and that the formalism in which the LKB is written should be such that, once the generalization is stated, the specific cases follow as consequences of the inference rules of the formalism.