meaningsplits

Meaningsplits is a theoretical concept in linguistics and cognitive semantics that describes the subdivision of a single lexical item's overall semantic space into two or more distinct but related senses. It captures how a word can acquire new, separable meanings while still retaining ties to its original sense. The phenomenon can occur diachronically, as languages evolve new senses from older ones, or synchronically, as speakers allocate different contexts to different senses within a stable polysemy.

In a meaningsplits account, a base meaning is represented as a network of interrelated features. When a split occurs, subsets of features become associated with new contexts, producing independent sense nuclei. Triggers include metaphorical extension, specialization, narrowing or broadening of use, and semantic reanalysis. Distinguishing a true split from conventional polysemy or mere sense extension can be challenging and is often addressed with corpus data, introspective judgments, and cross-linguistic comparisons.

Researchers study meaningsplits with sense inventories, distributional semantics, and semantic maps that visualize how senses cluster in a feature or vector space. The concept has practical relevance for natural language understanding, including word-sense disambiguation, machine translation, and lexicography, since recognizing splits helps systems assign appropriate senses in context.

Meaningsplits also intersects with related ideas such as polysemy, semantic shift, and lexical reorganization. While not universally adopted as a formal framework, the notion provides a useful lens for describing the dynamic and context-dependent nature of lexical meaning.