Introduction

In the section of Lyons' Semantics that deals with the distinction between homonymy and polysemy, he notes that a major criterion ‘is unrelatedness vs. relatedness of meaning … indeed, it is arguable that it is the only synchronically relevant consideration’ (1977: 551). However, he goes on to argue that all attempts ‘to explicate the notion of relatedness of meaning in terms of a componential analysis of the senses of lexemes … have so far failed’ (1977: 552–3). Although Lyons is sympathetic to a treatment of the lexicon that seeks to maximise polysemy at the expense of homonymy, he does not himself go on in that book to reconstruct the notion of relatedness of meaning that such a treatment requires.

Discussing polysemy some nine years earlier, Lyons was a little more explicit about what might be required: ‘Various … types of “extension” or “transference” of meaning were recognized by the Greek grammarians, and have passed into traditional works on rhetoric, logic, and semantics. Meanings that are more or less closely “related” in accordance with such principles are not traditionally regarded as being sufficiently different to justify the recognition of distinct words’ (1968: 406). Metaphorical extension is the only kind of extension explicitly discussed in connection with polysemy in Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics although it is clear from the quotation just given that it was not the only one that Lyons had in mind.