Exploring polysemy and its role in lexical sense relations in African languages: Insights from African Wordnet

Abstract

Polysemy has been considered in terms of sense relations where each sense of a polysemous expression is represented individually in the lexicon. Siswati and other African languages accounted for in African Wordnet do not differ in the characterisation of this phenomenon. Polysemy is relevant in linguistic debates because of its inherent lexical meaning representation and compositional semantics. Because polysemy proliferates in natural languages, it is distinguished from monosemy and homonymy, despite the fact that they may seem clear at an intuitive level. However, they have proven difficult to draw from practice to some extent. This article explores polysemy and its role in lexical sense relations in African languages, specifically Siswati. It further examines the inherent aspects of word meaning and the semantic relations between words, as well as the ways in which word meaning is related to syntactic structure, given that syntactic structure is the basis upon which the synsets and usage examples are formulated. The article further demonstrates aspects that make the Siswati language system susceptible to polysemy. It further considers the pragmatic approach in accounting for lexical semantics as this provides the basis for a unified account of the role of polysemy in numerous domains, and for the amplification that motivates its proliferation in natural languages.