polyseemisista

Polyseemisista is a neologistic term used in linguistics to denote a scholar who specializes in polysemy, the phenomenon whereby a single lexical item has multiple related senses. The word is a portmanteau formed from the prefix poly- meaning many, the root seme meaning sense or sign, and the suffix -ista indicating a practitioner or expert. In usage, a polyseemisista studies how words develop related meanings, how senses spread across domains, and how speakers access these senses in comprehension and production.

Scope includes compiling sense inventories, analyzing semantic networks, comparing polysemy across languages, and tracing diachronic shifts from historical data.

Relations to related fields include lexicography, semantics, cognitive linguistics, and natural language processing. The designation is sometimes contrasted with polysemanticists or lexicographers, and is used to emphasize the interpretive and empirical work on sense relations within linguistic research.

Reception and usage are mixed, as the term is relatively new and informal rather than standard in formal curricula or widely adopted departmental titles. Some scholars view it as a useful label for clarifying specialization in the study of sense relations, while others consider it redundant given established terms like semanticist or lexicographer. In practice, a polyseemisista might engage with metaphor extension, metonymy, sense disambiguation, and cross-linguistic polysemy to illuminate how language encodes meaning.