Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective linguistics Having a number of
meanings ,interpretations or understandings.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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I'm not acquainted with literary theory, and my academic training is in the rather different fields of hard science and history (where the words "polysemic" and "phatic" are not often used), so when I read books like this I am not really looking to participate in the intellectual debate that the author may want to have.
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In fact, a nonlinear reading would be in keeping with the transdisciplinary intellectual habits of the studioli patrons and artists, complementing the polysemic nature of the studioli compositions.
Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro
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His statement about the nature of religious truth is worth keeping in mind to instill humility in those of us who are religious believers: "Religion is truth-claiming, though the truth is particularly vague, polysemic, and hard to describe" p.221.
Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 9: Has Science Made Belief in God Obsolete?
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In Bes'z the word "right" is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended.
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The verb kana is polysemic, a feature which has allowed the by-now-discredited translation “to acquire” instead of the less theologically palatable “to create.”
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She also uses the polysemic figure of "Minerva's rent veil" as a symbol of Greece's fall.
The Ruins of Empire: Nationalism, Art, and Empire in Hemans's Modern Greece
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It may just be a question of translation of the greek word many of which are terribly polysemic.
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A more widely used terminology today distinguishes monosemic and polysemic words.
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Moreover, all these wannabe startups fall suspiciously silent when you start talking about stuff like latent semantic indexing and polysemic hierarchies.
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Sure, he provides plenty of linguistic examples of the types of mappings metaphorical, metonymical, polysemic, etc., and even the types of inferences made, but no description of how any of this occurs.
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