Introduction: The epistemological and methodological meaning of comprehension is linked not only to the actively practical and sociocultural context of cognition, but also to its personalization. If the knowledge is dominantly discursive, then the comprehension also contains essentially nonverbalizing components, since it relies on memory, imagination, perception, constructive activity of the consciousness, the subject’s life experience, his/her feelings, body movements etc. The comprehension phenomenon occurs when the cognition object is built into the integrity of the person’s social world. All the cases relate to identification of a certain content of the human experience. Actually, the things which the speaker knows must correspond to something that the interpreter knows, so that he/she could understand the speaker, because if the speaker is understood, it means that they are in the same cognitive domain. The task of the comprehensive study of the language and the speech requires considering such existential possibilities as «listening» and «silence». Listening demonstrates, first of all, the connection between the speech and the comprehension. A human being is a listening creature, because he/she initially aims at understanding. According to M. Heidegger, listening constitutes «the ability to be» since in the course of listening not only the others become open to the person, but he/she is open to the rest. However, listening as an existential possibility should not be confused with the sensorial perception of acoustic signals. Specific acoustic behavior of a person is rooted in the original «understanding listening». It is proven by the fact that listening is majorly «about what», and not «about how». Understanding «what» the speech is about is the condition for any dialogue to take place.

So far, we have looked at the traditional distinctions between polysemy (related senses) and homonymy (unrelated senses), on the one hand, and ambiguity (two or more stored senses, including homonymy and conventional polysemy) and vagueness (a single sense subject to contextual specification), on the other hand. With regard to the first distinction, we saw that neither etymological considerations nor speaker intuitions provide satisfactory criteria for distinguishing between polysemy and homonymy. As to the second distinction, we saw that the number of tests proposed to distinguish between ambiguity (homonymy and conventional polysemy) and vagueness did not yield clearcut results. An important reason for this was the contextual influence on these tests, reflecting the fact that any lexical item, whether monosemous, homonymous or polysemous, may have its meaning modulated on a particular occasion of use by the linguistic or non-linguistic context in which it occurs.

Linguists, philosophers of language and psychologists have long been interested in the polysemy phenomenon due to the challenging issues it raises for theories of semantic representation, semantic compositionality, language processing and communication. Traditional approaches tend to regard polysemy as a matter of different senses being listed under a single lexical entry, with the comprehension of a polysemous word involving selection of the contextually appropriate sense from among the list of senses (so-called sense enumeration lexicons). Another traditional line of approach regards polysemy as being represented in terms of a single, maximally general meaning, from which the contextually appropriate senses are derived (so-called core meaning approaches). In more modern approaches, it is generally acknowledged that polysemy is the result of the interaction of several factors, some of which are linguistic, some cognitive, and some communicative, and the debate is more about which of these factors is the most important: Does polysemy have a primarily linguistic basis (an assumption held by most scholars working within computational semantic almost 40 per cent of the entries in Webster’s Seventh Dictionary, is it essentially cognitive (as is claimed by scholars working within the cognitive grammar tradition), or is it a fundamentally communicative phenomenon?

The components of abstract nature are formed due to modified transcendental experience of what we see and describe some transcendentally reduced cogito, but as reflecting subjects do not carry out natural supposing of being which is included in original direct perception of these meanings, taking place when direct plunging into the world. LE as a reflection of other order loses original mode corresponding to the direct act of contextual perception of a meaning. It should be noted that the combination of defined components of abstract nature is not chaotic. The aggregate of subjects and notions standing for a polysemous word meanings which, if we take into account their synthesis possibility, are always noematically interrelated, is also not chaotic in correlative regard. For this purpose we need to contemplate, discover the essence of things themselves. As a result carried out analysis acquires its transcendental base. 490 S. Pesina and O. Latushkina / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 192 ( 2015 ) 486 – 490 2. Every language speaker acts exclusively within his/her cognitive domain. The language has the function to orientate the person in his/her cognitive domain. Therefore, actually, the speaker has no physical possibilities to transmit the substance using associated language means, i.e., the sense which he/she associates with this form in his/her consciousness. In the communication process no information transfer by means of a language occurs, because the listener creates information, reducing uncertainty by interactions in his/her own communicative and cognitive domain (Pesina, Solonchak, 2014). The interaction of the entire concept volume in the conditions of a permanent «communicative time pressure» (minimum time for perception and reaction in the speech flow) would not satisfy the most important principle of saving which foresees using minimum cognitive efforts in the verbal and mental processes. Omission of this and other above factors will produce fragmented knowledge which will not bring us closer to the synthesis in understanding of the language and thinking phenomenon (Solonchak, Pesina, 2014). . Lexical eidos is formed as a result of the numerous manifestations of contextual meanings. It is formulated as a result of abstracting from everything that is psychic and those predicates of the objective world, the presence of which is personally conditioned. It’s possible to suppose that invariant meanings of polysemantic words are systemically important units which demonstrate the non-reflectivity of the language system level in relation to the speech level. It should be noted phenomenology has always taken interest in such language system universal units revealing. LE includes the programme for all (or almost all) particular meanings of a word and, vice versa, each variant has subtle reference to a model which manages the process of transferred meanings semiosis.

Methods. Being very complex, the concept of polysemy poses a challenge for lexical semanticists as well. As pointed out by Jackson and Amwela ,it involves a certain number of problems, such as the number of meanings, transference of meanings and difficulty in recognizing polysemy as opposed to homonymy. Since one meaning cannot always be delimitated and distinguished from another, we cannot determine exactly how many meanings a polysemous word has. Consider the verb eat, which has the following main meanings 1. to put food in your mouth and chew and swallow it (She was eating an ice cream.) 2. eat first and then go to the movie.) 3. to use a very large amount of something (This car eats petrol.) However, besides its literal meaning, it is also used in idioms having a transferred meaning, such as eat your words (admit that what you said was wrong); eat somebody alive (be very angry with someone); could eat a horse; have somebody eating out of your hand; eat somebody out of house and home; and you are what you eat, etc. What is more, in the literal sense, we can also distinguish between eating nuts and eating soup, the former with fingers and the latter with spoons. If we push this analysis too far, we may end up deciding that the verb eat has a different meaning for every type of food we eat. Even this example shows that a word may have both a ought we cannot determine with precision how many different meanings a given word may have altogether. Nevertheless, the most puzzling question both lexicographers and lexical semanticists are faced with is how to distinguish polysemy from homonymy. As generally defined in semantics homonymy refers to etymologically unrelated words that happen to have the same pronunciation and/or spelling (e.g. bank as a financial institution and the edge of a river). Conversely, polysemes are etymologically and therefore semantically related, and typically originate from metaphoric/metonymic usage (e.g. bank as a building and a financial institution). The distinction is, however, not always straightforward, especially since words that are etymologically related can, over time, drift so far apart that the original semantic relation is no longer recognizable, pupil (in a school) and pupil (of the eye). Homonymy and polysemy often give rise to ambiguity, and context is highly relevant to disambiguate the meaning of utterances. Consider the oft mentioned example from Lyons, in which the two phenomena appear together.

In the course of the 20th century, the focus of linguistic studies, in general, changed from a diachronic perspective to a synchronic perspective. However, polysemy played only a minor role in the structuralist tradition. In the theory of semantics developed by Katz & Fodor (1963) and Katz (1972), the issue of polysemy did not receive much attention. For one thing, Katz (1972) did not form uyckens & Zawada 2001:xii). Accordingly, polysemy was maximally restricted and bringing as many different senses under one semantic definition was given preference. In fact, polysemy was largely regarded as the unusual case, with monosemy and homonymy being regarded as the norm. Still several linguists (Leech 1981, Lyons 1977, 1981, 1995 and Lipka 7 Polysemy in Traditional vs. Cognitive Linguistics 1992, etc.) did explore polysemy focussing primarily on the differences between polysemy and homonymy. They recognised that the various senses of a polysemous word could be derived from a basic sense but did not go further than that. Besides, in these traditional approaches, polysemy is restricted to the study of word meaning. The lexical semanticists mentioned above use it to describe words like body, which has a range of distinct meanings. Consider some of its different meanings (Mayor 2009:172): (2) a My fingers were numb and my whole body ached. b The dog found the body of a girl in the woods. c Nick had bruises on his face and body. The bird has a small body and long wings. d Workers at the factory are making steel bodies for cars. e The arguments are explained in the body of the text. body. The word body is a typical example of polysemy as its different senses are related both semantically and historically. Body in the following examples can refer to the physical structure of a person or animal (a), a corpse (b), the central dy not including the head, arms, legs, wings (c), the main structure of a vehicle not including the engine, wheels, etc. (d), the main or central part of something (e) or a group of people working together to do a particular job (f). Historically, it goes back to OE bodi (Onions 1966:104). As is mentioned above, traditional linguists (e.g. Leech 1981, Lyons, 1981, 1995, Lipka 1992 and Jackson & Amwela, 2007, etc.) usually treated polysemy together with homonymy. In their view, although they have the same shape, homonyms are considered distinct lexemes, mainly because they have unrelated meanings and different etymologies. In fact, homonyms have two types: homographs (same spelling), e.g. lead (metal) and lead homophones (same sound), e.g. right, rite and write.

Principle of equality of words and meanings would turn sign in a fixed device, devoid of the ability to transfer movement from the specific to the abstract, from the literal to the figurative, from the particular to the general. If each character would perform only one function, the language would be just a collection of labels. At the same time, it is impossible to imagine a language, where signs would be so mobile that they wouldn’t mean anything outside the specific situations. This implies that the nature of a verbal sign must be both constant and mobile. In general, despite the fact that multiple words complicate the process of communication it is an effective means to transfer the infinite diversity of human thoughts and feelings. Creation of separate denotation for each individual object, phenomena or class of objects, facts and phenomena would result in excessive amplification of the lexical system, which would make it very difficult to use. Polysemy is a linguistic economy. However, it should be noted that quite often polysemy studies excluded extra-linguistic factor from the linguistic research. Under this approach, the meanings are formed and interact on its own, without the involvement of human consciousness, and the polysemy is based on logical-conceptual, theoretical modeling of the connection between language and cognition. This research proposes a solution of the most complicated problem of understanding and operating of polysemous words the use of which poses a grinding difficulty for phenomenological analysis (and others), since any consciousness – phenomenological or ordinary – cannot but ignore the fact that polysemy unfavours mutual S. Pesina and O. Latushkina / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 192 ( 2015 ) 486 – 490 489 understanding. Carrying out the research task related to the study of semantic layers of different levels, ideal object revealing regardless of material substances, definition of the most significant, essential, and general semantic and mental properties, qualities and mechanisms of consciousness and basing on the theory of eidos in phenomenology we introduced the concept of lexical eidos (LE) interpreted as an aggregate of the most significant universal semantic components which are intuitively defined in the course of phenomenological reduction and are unchanged in the stream of meanings variation composing the semantic formula of a word or phrase; lexical eidos content is revealed at the level of scientific and logical consciousness (Pesina, Solonchak, 2014). The knowledge of lexical eidos or semantic formula of a word can help to avoid the necessity to keep in mind all figurative meanings. Each actualization of a meaning of a polysemous word leads to the formation of some persistent knowledge. This means some ideal immanence which refers us to further significant interrelations of possible syntheses. It makes possible to talk about system language meanings (in contrast to speech context realizations fixed in dictionaries) including components of abstract nature covering the semantics of all derived meanings. In other words, the notion of a subject as it is and a subject similar to it (metaphor) is possible.

  Results. Polysemy and the challenge of meaning: Cognitive semantics requires an interdisciplinary approach to the study of meaning. One of the most significant works, in our view, is a relatively recent publication by R. Jackendoff ‘s A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning, devoted to the problem of meaning addressed from the perspective of different sciences. Meanings are flexible and adaptive in nature: “The meaning of the word is the concept it expresses…. The meaning of a sentence is the thought it expresses…. Meanings are thoughts expressed by language. …They are flexible and adaptive”. This idea dates back to the works of Lev Vygotsky, who studied the connections among concepts, words, sense, and meaning: “We found the unit that reflects the unity of thinking and speech in the meaning of the word…. That is, we cannot say that word meaning is a phenomenon of either speech or thinking. The word without meaning is not a word, but an empty sound. Meaning is a necessary, constituting feature of the word itself. … word meaning is nothing other than a generalization, that is, a concept”

On the relevance-theoretic approach, the interpretation of type shifting constructions such as the VP begin a book in above, would proceed in terms of a pragmatic process that recovers the contextually appropriate event associated with the VP, rather than in terms of a lexicon-internal generative mechanism .In the case of , where the most accessible interpretation of the utterance ‘I’ve just begun a huge old book’ was that Mary had just begun dusting a huge old book, this would be the most relevant one the hearer could derive. It would be the interpretation that required the least processing effort, and gave rise to a set of cognitive effects of the expected sort (i.e. it provided an adequate explanation for Mary’s previous utterance of ‘Hang on a minute!’). Thus, it achieved relevance in the way that the hearer might have expected it to do.74 Given the dependence of polysemy comprehension on this constructive pragmatic inference process, geared to the recovery of the speaker’s meaning, I would like to suggest that pragmatics may play a more fundamental role in the development and motivation of polysemy in natural languages than has previously been recognized. In the next section, I discuss two hypotheses about the evolutionary basis for our ability to attribute speaker meanings, and suggest that the development and proliferation of polysemy in natural languages are best accounted for within an approach that takes language to have evolved against the background of an already existing cognitive capacity for attributing mental states to others. My suggestion is that the fundamentally pragmatic nature of polysemy has an evolutionary basis.

Linguists face the challenge associated with polysemy – to define the necessary contextual features or meaning of the word. Among the causes of the expansion of the range of use of an existing word with fixed meaning, the main ones are extralinguistic ones. Various historical, social, economic, technological, and other changes in people’s lives give rise to the need to generate new names. Notably the meanings perceived now as figurative, can eventually become direct or primary, and vice versa, especially as a result of the loss of direct meaning code (for example, the dictionaries traditionally defined the first meaning of the English noun “coach” as a “carriage”, now more dictionaries put the meaning “passenger coach” first, on the basis of use frequency). This process, called “semantic derivation” or “attributes formation”, manifests itself as a tendency of language, the propensity to order symbol connections and relations with the need to reflect the endless contacts between objects. Furthermore, the technical and general progress leads to creation of neologisms: languages, in which the word formation is underdeveloped, are filling gaps in the vocabulary by adding new meanings to the existing word forms. Principle of equality of words and meanings would turn sign in a fixed device, devoid of the ability to transfer movement from the specific to the abstract, from the literal to the figurative, from the particular to the general. If each character would perform only one function, the language would be just a collection of labels. At the same time, it is impossible to imagine a language, where signs would be so mobile that they wouldn’t mean anything outside the specific situations. This implies that the nature of a verbal sign must be both constant and mobile. In general, despite the fact that multiple words complicate the process of communication it is an effective means to transfer the infinite diversity of human thoughts and feelings. Creation of separate denotation for each individual object, phenomena or class of objects, facts and phenomena would result in excessive amplification of the lexical system, which would make it very difficult to use. Polysemy is a linguistic economy. However, it should be noted that quite often polysemy studies excluded extra-linguistic factor from the linguistic research. Under this approach, the meanings are formed and interact on its own, without the involvement of human consciousness, and the polysemy is based on logical-conceptual, theoretical modeling of the connection between language and cognition. This research proposes a solution of the most complicated problem of understanding and operating of polysemous words the use of which poses a grinding difficulty for phenomenological analysis (and others), since any consciousness – phenomenological or ordinary – cannot but ignore the fact that polysemy unfavours mutual S. Pesina and O. Latushkina / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 192 ( 2015 ) 486 – 490 489 understanding.

Furthermore, it has also been demonstrated by some of the linguists mentioned above (e.g. Lyons 1977:551 552 and Lipka 1992:136, etc.) that there is subjective association involved in making a distinction between polysemy and homonymy as well. In other words, there is a good deal of agreement among native speakers as to what counts as the one and what counts as the other in particular instances. However, there are also very many instances about which native speakers will hesitate or be in disagreement. Finally, as is referred to above, homonymy and polysemy are often the basis of a lot of word play, usually for humorous effects. In the nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb, we think of a small animal, but in the comic version, Mary had a little lamb, some rice and vegetables, we think of a small amount of meat. The polysemy of lamb allows two interpretations. However, we make sense of the riddle Why are trees often mistaken for dogs? by recognising the homonymy in the answer: Because of their bark (Yule 2006:107 108). In the light of all these problems related to polysemy it is understandable why it has been so widely discussed in the literature. In fact, we can make a distinction between two different approaches in their treatment. While traditional grammarians such as Lyons (1977, 1981, 1995), Leech (1981), Cowie (1982), Lipka (1992) and Jackson & Amwela (2007), etc. assume that polysemy is a characteristic of only word meaning, cognitive linguists (Lakoff 1987, Tyler & Evans 2003, Croft & Cruse 2004, Evans & Green 2006 and Evans 2007, etc.) challenged this view by regarding polysemy as a category of other areas of language, such as morphology, phonology and syntax. This paper sets out to compare these two opposing approaches. Thus the primary aim of this study is twofold. First, I will look at how polysemy is treated in traditional approaches showing primarily what attempts were made to differentiate polysemy from homonymy and what the drawbacks of the criteria suggested for this were. Second, I will highlight the new approach to polysemy in cognitive linguistics.

  Discussion. Our analysis has shown that the sequence of conceptual operations presented above, accompanying the acquisition of primary and secondary meanings, is conditional upon the time and character of cognitive operations. It is still unclear how these operations occur: do they occur consecutively or do some of them develop simultaneously? The nature of these cognitive operations requires further research involving neurologists and neurolinguists. The opposite process  –  identification of the meaning of polysemous words  –  depends on the cognitive context in which the new meaning is acquired and identified. Each polysemous word is associated with a set of dynamic cognitive contexts forming a complex multi-dimensional mental representation, which could potentially capture and store a significant amount of conceptual information, referring in fact to any number of conceptual domains that are relevant to the identification of a particular sense of the word .Consider the following example: “After telling my five-year-old daughter I’m excited because my favorite band is coming to town to play, she ran to her room and started cleaning up her toys. When I asked her what she was doing she said, ‘Mommy, those are big guys and if they’re coming over to play I do not want them stepping on my stuff. They’ll break everything!”. This example is revealing for several reasons: it is an illustration of a basic assumption that the primary meaning is preferred to the derived one (in this case “to play”  –  “spend time doing enjoyable things, such as using toys and taking part in games”. The context of the situation serves as a prime for the activation of the basic meaning. Conceptual priming is a faster means of identifying a particular word meaning after the presentation of a prime. The results of our research show that a set of cognitive contexts (or a particular cognitive context) can act as a conceptual prime, leading to faster and more accurate identification of the target word sense. The method of probabilistic conceptual modelling of word sense disambiguation, which we suggest, clearly demonstrates the role of a particular type of cognitive context and conceptual primes in word sense disambiguation (ibid). The mental lexicon performs an important role in polysemy resolution, since it is the mental lexicon that concentrates various types of cognitive processes connected with perception, processing, storage, retrieval, usage, and generation of knowledge. It is often understood as a system of concepts and links between them which have been formed as a result of human cognitive activity. The meanings and concepts they are based on form networks with other meanings related to them conceptually and, therefore, semantically. New meanings are not acquired in isolation. They integrate into existing conceptual networks. The more meanings are acquired, the more differentiated they are compared to other words and other meanings within the structure of the polysemous word. In the mental lexicon, a polysemous word may be represented by a complex mental representation  –  a set of cognitive contexts associated with different senses of the polysemous word.

Taken together, the studies considered in this section indicate that type of lexical ambiguity affects processing, and, by inference, representation. Assuming that 71 homonymous words are represented separately, this does not seem to be the case for at least certain kinds of polysemy. As we have seen, the results are to some extent conflicting. In large part, this seems to be due to differences in the kind of polysemous stimuli used, as pointed out by Klepousniotou and her colleagues used polysemous words that had fairly distinct senses (e.g. liberal paper, shredded paper), giving them a ‘homonymic character’, and found no differences in processing between homonymous and polysemous words. When dividing the polysemous stimuli into different categories, Klepousniotou found a significant difference between the processing of homonymy and count mass polysemy but no significant difference between homonymy and metaphorically based polysemy. Overall, the results are consistent with the view that not all polysemous words are represented in the same way. Rather than storing only a single core meaning or a total list of all the possible distinct senses, the lexicon may store some reasonable number of senses. In some cases, the senses of a polysemous word may have become conventional to the extent that they are not obviously distinct from homonymy (as in many cases of metaphorical polysemy, e.g. foot). In other cases, only a single meaning may be stored and the other meanings contextually derived (either lexicon-internally or pragmatically). This view of polysemy representation is directly incompatible with a Katz-style sense enumeration lexicon that lists homonymous and polysemous senses of a linguistic form together under a single lexical entry. Nor does it mesh well with Lakoff and Brugman’s ‘full-specification’ approach, which takes all the senses associated with a polysemous lexical form to be represented as part of a semantic network. However, the experimental evidence is, in principle, compatible with several of the other lexical semantic accounts discussed in the first part of this chapter, including the generative lexicon theory, Jackendoff’s conceptual semantics, and conceptual atomism. Given the lack of more specific empirical evidence, a choice between these accounts has to be made largely on theoretical grounds.