Polisemitului

Polisemitului is the Romanian term used in linguistics to denote polysemy—the phenomenon whereby a single lexical item has multiple related senses. This concept is central to lexicography, semantics, and language comprehension, because it explains how words can be used in different contexts while retaining a core conceptual connection among senses.

It is distinguished from homonymy, where unrelated meanings share the same form due to historical coincidence rather than semantic extension. Polysemy typically arises from metaphorical or metonymic extension, generalization or specialization of a sense, and the creation of sense clusters that share a cognitive core. The distribution of senses is influenced by context, usage, and cognitive representations encoded in mental lexicons.

Examples illustrate the phenomenon, such as the English word "mouth" used for the anatomical cavity and for the entrance of a river or cave, or "set" used to describe a collection and to indicate positioning or adjustment. In Romanian, as in other languages, polysemy affects dictionaries, language teaching, translation, and natural language processing, requiring careful sense disambiguation in dictionaries, corpus studies, and computational models. Research in diachronic semantics tracks how senses split or extend over time, while synchronic analyses examine how current usage maps onto sense inventories.