Senseextent

Senseextent is a theoretical concept in lexical semantics that describes the semantic breadth of a lexeme, encompassing its core sense and its extended or peripheral senses across contexts and languages. It is used to discuss how widely a word’s meaning spreads beyond its most basic sense, reflecting polysemy, metaphorical extension, and semantic drift over time.

The term is not universally standardized and appears in discussions of semantic change and lexical diversity. Researchers may treat senseextent as the capacity of a word to be used across domains, genres, and cultures, indicating how far its meanings can extend beyond the primary sense in ordinary use or within specialized registers.

Measurement and methods for senseextent rely on several metrics. Sense inventory size counts distinct senses in dictionaries or corpora. Distributional analyses assess how frequently each sense is used and in which contexts. Entropy-based measures capture the uniformity of sense use, indicating whether a word’s senses are evenly distributed or concentrated in a few dominant meanings. Cross-linguistic comparisons examine variation in sense inventories and extension patterns across languages.

Examples help illustrate the concept. The noun bank has at least two widely used senses: a financial institution and the side of a river. The word set has a notably large senseextent, including a collection, a group of dishes, a fixed position, to install, to set in a specific state, among others. Such breadth can vary by domain, genre, and historical period.

Applications include informing lexicography and the construction of sense inventories, guiding language teaching about polysemy, and aiding natural language processing tasks such as word-sense disambiguation and semantic change modeling.

Related concepts include lexical ambiguity, polysemy, semantic extension, and sense inventories.