Polysemy has recently emerged as a popular topic in philosophy of language. While much existing research focuses on the relatedness among senses, this article introduces a novel perspective that emphasizes the continuity of sense individuation, sense regularity, and sense productivity. This new perspective has only recently gained traction, largely due to advancements in computational linguistics. It also poses a serious challenge to semantic minimalism, so I present three arguments against minimalism from the continuous perspective that touch on the minimal concept, the distinction from homonymy, and the quasi‐rule‐like nature of polysemy. Last, I provide an account of polysemy that incorporates this continuous perspective.

This article highlights certain inconsistencies that exist in modern lexicography with respect to word meaning representation and proposes an alternative outlook on the nature of word meaning based on the principles of the functional linguo-anthropological theory. Through the case study of the lexeme bank , it has been demonstrated that word meaning can be presented as a more coherent structure if only the functional evaluative nature of language be taken into account more accurately while compiling a dictionary entry. The article defends the idea that the evaluative nature of human experience as a source of meaning in language determines the way lexical items behave in real texts and, therefore, demonstrates the necessity of abandoning basic principles of referential semantics (with its stress on objective features of referents as physical objects) in lexicographical descriptions.

The phenomenon of homonymy in the Ossetian language is considered as one of the complex and multi-aspect problems in Ossetian linguistics and in general linguistic theory. The lack of special works in Ossetian studies makes it relevant to consider this phenomenon in the context of functional homonymy. It is emphasized that the factors complicating the process of studying the conditions of emergence and functioning of homonyms in language and speech are the semantic intersections with polysemy, grammatically diverse “unpredictability”, functional variability, and as a result, the presence of various classifications and definitions within homonyms. An overview of the most well-known classifications of homonyms, analysis of lexicographical sources and literary texts has been made. As a result, the main criteria for “recognizing” functional homonyms have been identified and their differentiation from lexicalgrammatical homonyms in the Ossetian language has been carried out. The analysis has shown a number of difficulties in identifying functional homonyms. The author concludes that morphological instability and the syntactic functions of a word in a sentence can change its semantics, thus transferring it from one type of homonym to another. At the same time, it is noted that the main etymological principle of distinguishing homonyms may be ineffective when considering a larger number of parts of speech.

The proposed study confirms the validity of using a set of criteria to distinguish between homonymy and polysemy in Ukrainian-language word complexes with borrowings. After outlining the theoretical foundations of homonymy and polysemy and analyzing the works of foreign and Ukrainian linguists with the focus on assessing the state of the problem and the criteria they propose, the authors conclude that there is no consensus on this issue. The distinction between homonymy and polysemy at the lexical level depends on various factors, including the research material, the current state of lexical theory, and the approaches adopted by certain linguists, which determine the diversity of the proposed criteria for distinction. At the same time, the authors note that an approach in which a set of criteria is relevant has become increasingly common, with each criterion complementing, clarifying, and specifying the lexical status of a particular phenomenon. The validity of such a set of criteria is demonstrated by the example of homocomplexes with a borrowed component, which, after adaptation to the Ukrainian language, have entered the lexical fund of the Ukrainian language. The manifestation of the corresponding features is traced for each criterion, and a hierarchy of the significance of each of them is established.

... synchronic semantic analysis of English . From all this we conclude that etymology cannot be a useful criterion for distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy ... distinction illustrated in ( 2 ) is often not made and that the terms ... No detailed description available for "An Outline of English Lexicology".

One of the most persistent and practically consequential problems in lexicographic theory is the absence of a universally accepted procedure for separating homonymy from polysemy. The problem becomes especially visible in the compilation of homonym dictionaries, where every headword entry implicitly embodies a classificatory decision: treating two meanings as independent homonyms rather than as related senses of a single polysemous word reshapes the entire macrostructure of the dictionary and affects how the resource is used by translators, language learners, and computational systems alike. Despite decades of scholarly attention, lexicographers continue to rely on heterogeneous and often incompatible criteria—etymological, semantic, distributional, and morphological—and the resulting dictionaries routinely contradict one another on borderline cases. The aim of this study is to investigate the nature and scope of these inconsistencies by conducting a systematic comparative analysis of four influential homonym dictionaries of Russian and English, to identify the theoretical sources of disagreement, and to develop an integrated diagnostic procedure that combines multiple criteria into a transparent, reproducible decision-making protocol. A corpus of 150 contested lexical pairs was extracted from the four dictionaries and subjected to a five-parameter evaluation that included etymological tracing, synchronic semantic distance measurement through componential analysis, derivational paradigm comparison, collocational profiling based on the Russian National Corpus and the British National Corpus, and syntactic frame analysis. The results showed that 46.7 percent of all contested pairs received inconsistent treatment across dictionaries, and that the inconsistencies were overwhelmingly attributable to the isolated application of a single criterion rather than a balanced consideration of multiple types of evidence. When the proposed integrated procedure was applied, classification accuracy—measured against a gold standard established by expert consensus—reached 91.3 percent, and inter-annotator agreement among three independent lexicographers rose from a Cohen's kappa of 0.52 to 0.84. These findings demonstrate that a principled multi-criteria approach can substantially reduce the subjectivity that currently undermines the reliability of homonym dictionaries, and they point toward a more transparent and empirically grounded lexicographic practice.