Describing Polysemy: The Case of ‘Crawl’

Abstract

Abstract The realization that a word can have more than one meaning becomes a part of the ordinary language user’s awareness through everyday experiences with dictionaries. It is common for a dictionary entry to have numbered or lettered sub-parts, and these are understood as informing the user of meaning differences for the word. An example of such a division into separate senses can be seen in the entry for the verb crawl in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD, 1992) shown in Figure 5.1. Ordinary dictionary users seldom have a need to look a word up in more than one dictionary, but if they do, they are likely to discover discrepancies between one dictionary and another in respect to the manner of representing the meanings a word can have. Figure 5.2 shows the entry for the same verb in the Collins English Dictionary (CED, 1991).

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