Making Sense out of Meaning: An Essay in Lexical Semantics

In his exploration of word meaning, Walter Hirtle examines an important and controversial topic in lexical semantics: polysemy, the capacity of words to manifest a range of different meanings when employed in different contexts.

Building on the work of French linguist Gustave Guillaume, Making Sense out of Meaning is a speaker-oriented study that describes how speakers form word meaning and not, as in other theories, how listeners interpret the meaning of what they hear. Hirtle develops a ge...