Original scientific paper

Contrastive-typological approach to the study of polysemy and complementation systems

Mario Brdar ; Pedagoški fakultet, Osijek

Abstract

The paper considers the value of contrastive-typological approach to the study of polysemy. It is shown that this approach fails to provide a neat means of distinguishing between intralingual polysemy and homonymy. However, it brings to light a number of interesting cross-linguistic differences in the spread of both lexical and syntactic polysemy: there is a general tendency for predicates to have several alternative valency frames attached to a single morphological form in languages with a widespread lexical polysemy (e.g. in English), whereas languages like Croatian and Hungarian that seem to have semantically narrower lexemes, i.e. less lexical polysemy, tend to employ a variety of strategies (“suppletion”, prefixation, suffixation, etc.) to keep their predicate-argument structures apart.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

173327

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/173327

Publication date:

4.12.1995.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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