Words with complex semantic types such as book are characterised by a multiplicity of interpretations that are not mutually exclusive (e.g., as a physical object and/or informational content). Their status with respect to lexical ambiguity is notoriously unclear, and it is debatable whether complex types are a particular form of polysemy (closely related to metonymy) or whether they belong to monosemy. In this study, we investigate the nature of complex types by conducting two experiments on ambiguous nouns in French. The first experiment collects speakers’ judgements about the sameness of meaning between different uses of complex-type, metonymic and monosemous words. The second experiment uses a priming paradigm and a sensicality task to investigate the online processing of complex-type words, as opposed to metonymic and monosemous words. Overall results indicate that, on a continuum of lexical ambiguity, complex types are closer to monosemy than to metonymy. The different interpretations of complex-type words are highly connected and fall under the same meaning, arguably in relation to a unique reference. These results suggest that complex types are associated with single underspecified entries in the mental lexicon. Moreover, they highlight the need for a model of lexical representations of ambiguous words that can account for the difference between complex types and metonymy.

Following Denis Bouchard's neo-Saussurean Sign Theory of Language, with a focus on the notion of Grammar Semantics, this article sketches a proposal for a unified understanding of the most multifunctional among Norwegian verbs, namely få ‘get’. Based on Bouchard's analysis of French être ‘be’ and avoir ‘have’ and corresponding signs in other languages, I propose that få is the dynamic version of ha ‘have’, which is a bivalent transitive copula. This abstract semantic value is shown to form the basis for the many contextual interpretations få receives, in its use both as a main verb and as an auxiliary. To my knowledge, a monosemic, unified understanding of få that covers all its uses and interpretations has not yet been proposed, especially not one that highlights its relationships with være ‘be’, ha ‘have’ and bli ‘be, become, get’. The study also includes a contrastive analysis of få and the English verb get.

Many pairs of words traditionally treated as crosslinguistic equivalents do not share the same set of senses, and dominant theories fail to account for this asymmetry. This article proposes an explanation for the crosslinguistic variation of polysemy based on two key insights from Bouchard's Sign Theory of Language. First, multifunctional words have only a single, abstract meaning, and second, properties of the linguistic sign follow from properties of the external systems with which language interfaces. The article describes the content of the English and French deictic verbs go, aller, come, and venir, showing that each possesses a simple semantic representation composed of primitives from general cognition. It then examines several specific semantic uses of go and aller, showing that differences in the surface polysemy of these verbs follow directly from a single difference in their abstract lexical meaning and the way the latter interacts with context, extralinguistic knowledge and grammar.

Many studies in cognitive linguistics have analyzed the semantics of over, notably the semantics associated with over as a preposition. Most of them generally conclude that over is polysemic and that this polysemy is to be described thanks to a semantic radial network, showing the relationships between the different meanings of the word. What we would like to suggest, to the contrary, is that the meanings of over are highly dependent on the utterance context in which its occurrences are embedded, and consequently that the meaning of over itself is under-specified, rather than polysemic. Moreover, to provide a more accurate account of the apparently wide range of meanings of over in context, we ought to take into account the other uses of this unit: as an adverb and particle, and not only as a preposition. In this paper, we provide a corpus-based description of over which leads us to propose a monosemic definition.