multimeaning

Multimeaning is the property of a linguistic form that encodes more than one meaning. It is a common source of lexical ambiguity in languages and may arise from polysemy, where related senses extend from a core meaning, or from homonymy, where unrelated meanings share the same form. Understanding multimeaning relies on context, syntax, pragmatics, and world knowledge to identify the intended sense in use.

Polysemy occurs when a single word acquires related senses through metaphorical or metonymic extension. For example, bright can describe light or intelligence, reflecting a shared underlying notion of vividness or clarity. Homonymy involves distinct senses that are historically separate but coincidentally identical in form, such as bank (financial institution) and bank (side of a river).

Disambiguation typically uses contextual cues: neighboring words, grammatical structure, and discourse factors. In written text, sentence-level disambiguation is common; in speech, prosody and intonation can help. Lexical databases like WordNet and sense-tagged corpora are used in linguistics and natural language processing to annotate and distinguish meanings.

Applications include dictionary compilation, translation, information retrieval, and AI language models. Recognizing multimeaning improves machine translation accuracy, search results ranking, and user understanding in interfaces that process natural language.

Related concepts include lexical ambiguity, polysemy, and word sense disambiguation.