Metaphorical extension (a fundamental feature of any language)

Ex.:

· leaf of a tree – leaf of a book

· hands of a person – hands of a clock

Polysemy has been complicated by the tendency of words to pick up the meanings from other dialects, languages & slang.

Ex.: executive

BrE – one who acts under the direction of somebody – исполнитель
AmE – a manager

now: AmE meaning is more widely used.

New & old meanings become interrelated, form a hierarchy.

They have some common semantic features, which preserve the integrity of the word.

Polysemantic words possess more than one meaning. The actual number of meanings of the commonly used words ranges from five to about a hundred. In fact, the commoner the word the more meanings it has.

The word table, e.g., has at least nine meanings in Modern English: 1. a piece of furniture; 2. the persons seated at a table; 3. sing. the food put on a table, meals; 4. a thin flat piece of stone, metal, wood, etc.; 5. pl. slabs of stone; 6. words cut into them or written on them (the ten tables); ^[1] 7. an orderly arrangement of facts, figures, etc.; 8. part of a machine-tool on which the work is put to be operated on; 9. a level area, a plateau. Each of the individual meanings can be described in terms of the types of meanings discussed above. We may, e.g., analyse the eighth meaning of the word table into the part-of-speech meaning — that of the noun (which presupposes the grammatical meanings of number and case) combined with the lexical meaning made up of two components The denotational semantic component which can be interpreted as the dictionary definition (part of a machine-tool on which the work is put) and the connotational component which can be identified as a specific stylistic reference of this particular meaning of the word table (technical terminology).

In polysemantic words, however, we are faced not with the problem of analysis of individual meanings, but primarily with the problem of the interrelation and interdependence of the various meanings in the semantic structure of one and the same word.