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Individual differences in word senses

  • Rachel E. Ramsey EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 19, 2021
Cognitive Linguistics
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics Volume 33 Issue 1

Abstract

Individual differences and polysemy have rich literatures in cognitive linguistics, but little is said about the prospect of individual differences in polysemy. This article reports an investigation that sought to establish whether people vary in the senses of a polysemous word that they find meaningful, and to develop a novel methodology to study polysemy. The methodology combined established tools: sentence-sorting tasks, a rarely used statistical model of inter-participant agreement, and network visualisation. Two hundred and five English-speaking participants completed one of twelve sentence-sorting tasks on two occasions, separated by a delay of two months. Participants varied in how similarly they sorted the sentences as compared to other participants, and mean agreement across all 24 tasks did not meet an established threshold of acceptable agreement. Between the two test phases, inter-participant agreement varied to a significant but trivial degree. Networks generated for each dataset varied in the degree to which they captured all participants’ responses. This variation correlated with inter-participant agreement. The data collectively suggest that word senses may be subject to individual differences, as is the case in other linguistic phenomena. The methodology proved replicable and has a promise as a useful tool for studying polysemy.

Keywords: individual differences; network theory; polysemy; quantitative methods; word sense disambiguation
Corresponding author: Rachel E. Ramsey, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Dubit Limited, Leeds, UK, E-mail:

Funding source: Northumbria University, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010052

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ewa Dąbrowska, Amanda Patten, Dagmar Divjak, Sarah Duffy, John Newman, Laura Janda and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on the research and earlier versions of the manuscript, and to the participants for their involvement.

  1. Research funding: Some of this work was funded by Northumbria University, UK under a University Studentship (2013–2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010052.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0020).

Received: 2021-02-14
Accepted: 2021-09-03
Published Online: 2021-10-19
Published in Print: 2022-02-23

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

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  2. Editorial
  3. Introduction to the Special Issue
  4. Research Articles
  5. Ambiguity avoidance as a factor in the rise of the English dative alternation
  6. Putting the argument back into argument structure constructions
  7. Individual differences in word senses
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https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0020
Keywords for this article
individual differences; network theory; polysemy; quantitative methods; word sense disambiguation

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Introduction to the Special Issue
  4. Research Articles
  5. Ambiguity avoidance as a factor in the rise of the English dative alternation
  6. Putting the argument back into argument structure constructions
  7. Individual differences in word senses
  8. Sound symbolism in Chinese children’s literature
  9. The emergence of Information Structure in child speech: the acquisition of c’est-clefts in French
  10. Improvisations in the embodied interactions of a non-speaking autistic child and his mother: practices for creating intersubjective understanding
  11. From ‘clubs’ to ‘clocks’: lexical semantic extensions in Dene languages
  12. English modal enclitic constructions: a diachronic, usage-based study of ’d and ’ll
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