La polisemia al crocevia tra semantica e pragmatica

Polysemy, i.e., the coexistence of multiple meanings of the same linguistic form, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in historico-natural languages and is central to describing their functioning. It is an indispensable resource for the life of languages and corresponds to a general principle of economy: if languages were supposedly ideal (cf. Lyons, 1977: 140), every event, fact, class, or cultural category would have a unique, and unambiguous designation. However, concrete historico-natural languages, are – due to the principle of economy and the fact that human experience has an enormous richness and complexity – characterized by phenomena of vagueness, indeterminacy, and ambiguity. It is therefore impossible to establish a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic signs and referents, and consequently, words, especially the most common ones, are usually polysemous and can therefore create problems of ambiguity for the receiver who is confronted with two (or more) possible interpretations. This paper will deal with the phenomenon of polysemy, in particular the way polysemous words trigger presuppositional phenomena in speakers so that the disambiguation of the possible meanings inscribed in the meanings of a polysemous word necessarily depends on the pragmatic context of the utterance. The aim of this paper is to show that polysemy is not just a linguistic issue, but a phenomenon of more general theoretical interest that allows us to deepen our understanding of the workings of human cognition and memory, and – taking into account the role played by context – is a topic of central importance in the study of the interface between semantics and pragmatics.