In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows:
We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater.
The coach devised a great play that put the visiting team on the defensive.
The children went out to play in the park.
In each sentence different collocates of "play" signal its different meanings.
People and computers, as they read words, must use a process called word-sense disambiguation to reconstruct the likely intended meaning of a word. This process uses context to narrow the possible senses down to the probable ones. The context includes such things as the ideas conveyed by adjacent words and nearby phrases, the known or probable purpose and register of the conversation or document, and the orientation (time and place) implied or expressed. The disambiguation is thus context-sensitive.
Advanced semantic analysis has resulted in a sub-distinction. A word sense corresponds either neatly to a seme (the smallest possible unit of meaning) or a sememe (larger unit of meaning), and polysemy of a word of phrase is the property of having multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses.
Often the senses of a word are related to each other within a semantic field. A common pattern is that one sense is broader and another narrower. This is often the case in technical jargon, where the target audience uses a narrower sense of a word that a general audience would tend to take in its broader sense. For example, in casual use "orthography" will often be glossed for a lay audience as "spelling", but in linguistic usage "orthography" (comprising spelling, casing, spacing, hyphenation, and other punctuation) is a hypernym of "spelling". Besides jargon, however, the pattern is common even in general vocabulary. Examples are the variation in senses of the term "wood wool" and in those of the word "bean".
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Polysemy (pəˈlɪsᵻmi or ˈpɒlᵻˌsiːmi; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not.
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon.
In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically (by meaning) that refers to a specific subject. The term is also used in anthropology, computational semiotics, and technical exegesis. Brinton (2000: p. 112) defines "semantic field" or "semantic domain" and relates the linguistic concept to hyponymy: Related to the concept of hyponymy, but more loosely defined, is the notion of a semantic field or domain. A semantic field denotes a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words.
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