UCLA

The term "polysemy" refers to the exhibition of multiple meanings, but this description is theoretically unhelpful and far from transparent. Polysemy has attracted attention from a diverse array of language-related academic (sub)disciplines, with modern linguistic work on the topic going back to at least the early 1970s. However, this attention has led to relatively muted progress in the realm of formal linguistic theory; this is especially true of Montagovian semantics. This thesis presents and problematizes the standard account of polysemy. I show that polysemous predicates are not well-described with the devices of our theory off-the-shelf and that the standard diagnostic—even when interpreted as explicitly and generously as possible—does not produce a concrete, coherent set of results. I also show that grinding, though usually discussed as a variety of polysemy in the literature, is better described as a distinct, independent phenomenon.