Polysemy Quotes

Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently.

Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

Words take on many different meanings.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

What does 'Ngaio' mean? I don't know. Like many Maori words, it has a number of meanings - clever, light on the water, a little bug - but I don't know which my parents had in mind.

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

You know sometimes words have two meanings.

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?

It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.