Eckhard Bick - VISL

than by asking ‘is it an A?’ or ‘is it a B?’. Thus, senses are distinguished by which
semantic prototype is closest, not by set membership proper - and since the
distinguishing line for one prototype is halfway to the next, neighbouring prototype, this
leaves a large margin of potential definitional uncertainty (labour saved for the parser).
Disambiguational prototype similarity is much easier to resolve than referential or
compositional identity or even set membership (as in hierarchical systems): Let’s
assume that sense A and sense B of a given word could be defined (within the system)
by 10 features each, of which they share three. Instead of grammatically treating all of
the 17 defining features, it is disambiguationally enough that 1 of the 14 distinguishing
features tests positive. For example, if the Danish word marsvin (meaning both
‘dolphin’ and ‘guinea pig’ could be prototyped as fish in one sense, and as rabbit in the
other, and if the grammar knows that fish swim in water, and rabbits don’t, then all
‘swimming’ predicators and all ‘water’ place adverbials in the same clause make the
dolphin-reading very likely, though dolphins by no means can be defined as
biologically belonging to the set of ‘fish’ – they are just more close to the ‘fish’
prototype than to that of rabbit, in terms of their lexical collocational potential.
Disambiguationally, it is important to distinguish between “lexical” polysemy
where the different senses are what could be called “thesauric heteronyms” belonging to
different areas of a thesauric system, and “thesauric” polysemy where the different
senses are “thesauric hyponyms” of the same hyperonym. In the second case,
disambiguation is only needed where the distinctions are forced by the need for
translation into different terms, in the first case, disambiguation will be useful in
monolingual analysis, too, since it may help disambiguate the form and function of the
word in question, or of other words in the sentence.
In lexical polysemy, one doesn’t need many prototypes in order to distinguish
between senses that are accidental homographs (converging polysemy) or stem from
metaphorical or metonymic transfer (diverging polysemy). In the first case, different
etymology will usually ensure a fair degree of “semantic distance”, like in ‘fato’ (‘suit’,
‘flock’) that has absorbed the meanings of ‘facto’ (‘fact’) in Brazilian Portuguese
because of a phonetic and graphical disappearance of ‘c’ before ‘t’ in many Brazilian
words. In the second - metaphorical – case, “semantic distance” with regard to one or
more features is what characterises a metaphor in the first place. Thus, metaphoric
transfer often moves from abstract to concrete or vice versa, or from animal to human,
as when Danish ‘sild’ in its Portuguese translation has to be disambiguated into its
‘fish’ and ‘girl’ meanings. Metonymic transfer is often used “live” as a purely rhetorical
tool, where no disambiguation is necessary before translation, since the effect can be
assumed to be the same in the target language (‘an angry letter’ – ‘uma carta furiosa’, ‘o
Itamarati hesitou’ – ‘the Itamarati [palace of government] hesitated’), but some
synecdochic relations (pars pro toto, totum pro parte) do need to be treated lexically, as
for Danish ‘træ’ that becomes ‘árvore’ (‘tree’) in Portuguese as a plant, but ‘madeira’
(‘wood’) as a material. In all the above cases, whether disambiguation is wanted in
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