Polysemythat

Polysemythat is a linguistic neologism used to describe a pattern in which a polysemous lexeme is guided toward a single interpretation within a discourse by contextual disambiguation cues. The term combines polysemy with the word that, highlighting the role of that-clauses and related syntactic material in selecting a sense. It remains informal and is not part of a standardized framework, but appears in exploratory discussions of how context constrains meaning.

Conceptually, polysemythat treats sense selection as an interaction between lexical ambiguity and discourse-level anchoring. In a text, a speaker or writer may repeatedly pair a word with a specific that-clause or presupposed content, thereby narrowing the range of plausible senses for that word within the narrative.

Example: the word bank is polysemous. In “The bank that approved the loan funded the project,” the that-clause anchors the financial institution sense; in “The bank that borders the river is eroding,” the riverside sense is anchored. If the that-clause recurs across sentences, it reinforces a chosen sense and reduces ambiguity.

Applications include natural language processing, lexicography, and discourse analysis, where recognizing polysemythat patterns can inform disambiguation models and sense inventories. The concept emphasizes that interpretation can be actively steered by syntactic and discourse cues, not only by lexical properties.

See also: polysemy, disambiguation, sense extension.