Linguistic involvement and contextual meaning

Abstract

The starting point of this study is the assumption of the opposition between homonymy and contextual meaning. The origin of this opposition lies in the fact that homonymy leads to semantic multiplicity, while the contextual meaning concerns monosemy.

The ability to polysemy raises the problem of ambiguity of meaning. This latter leads to the question of how to identify monosemy. Indeed, the senses which can be considered as evident are in reality mainly primary senses, which may be accompanied by other variety of significations.

Linguists have proposed methods to identify the significances to be expressed by words able to be polysemie. Among these methods, we can mention those which use the context as a means to interpret what agrees in the written form and differs in the sense.

In this paper, we intend to answer the following questions: How can the sens be confused in case of homonymy to form an ambiguous phenomenon in language? How did the lexicographers consider the contextual sense and phenomena of semantic ambiguities? What is the method followed in language dictionaries to decompound the sense of polysemy ? And what is the effect of the chosen method on the article structure of the dictionary ?