The term "appendicitis", an example of monosemia, has only one meaning
Words are linguistic units that have meaning . The notion of meaning, meanwhile, refers to sense .
A single meaning
A word can have a single meaning or several . In the field of linguistic semantics, we speak of monosemy to name the property of the term that has a single meaning , while polysemy appears when the same word has a multiplicity of meanings .
Monosemy, in short, implies that there is only one possible link between the signifier and the signified . This feature guarantees precision and eliminates ambiguity.
Generally, monosemic words are used in the field of science since inaccuracies cannot exist in this field. However, most of the linguistic expressions that we use every day are polysemic and their meaning is given by the context.
Take the case of the word appendicitis . This word is endowed with monosemy: it only refers to an inflammation of the vermiform appendix and not to anything else. Note that the term appendix , on the other hand, is polysemic because it can refer to an organ of the human body (the aforementioned vermicular or vermiform appendix), to a part of the animal body, to an element attached to another, etc.
Consequences for communication
Although it could be assumed that monosemy favors communication, various studies maintain that even within the scientific field, the restrictions of a language of this type, which in addition to being monosemic can also be called unisignifier , can lead to different difficulties. The most obvious is the need to remember all the relevant vocabulary, since none of the terms have a synonym .
Perhaps we are not aware of the great comfort that synonyms provide us in everyday speech. Not only those that denote equivalent meanings, but even those that allow us to describe little by little that concept whose word we have forgotten. Let's look at an example: in a conversation, we can't remember the term "museum", and so we try to give our interlocutor an improvised definition such as "a building in which works of art are exhibited."
Of course, we could also define appendicitis as "an inflammation of the vermiform appendix", as we mentioned above, but in this case these other scientific terms would be necessary , while we could arrive at the definition of "museum" in multiple ways, regardless of our degree. of knowledge of the language and, needless to say, without any need to have entered one or to be attracted to the art. Even in very ordinary language we could say "the house where you can see paintings", something that does not happen in a scientific environment.
In short, monosemy requires work of exponential difficulty, because we must remember many specific words, which in turn require the memorization of others to define them, and so on. The opposite, polysemy, can speed up the communication process. This is because there are short words with simple pronunciation that can be reused in different contexts easily. In this framework, polysemy would contribute to increasing the efficiency of language .
"Museum" has more than one meaning, and has synonyms
Specific applications
Although we have talked about the scientific field in general, we could mention each of its disciplines and in all of them we would find examples of monosemy, with different uses and particular objectives. One of the most relevant and least known is translation science , which focuses on a systematic study of the theory, characteristics and uses of interpretation and translation.
The American linguist Charles Edward Ruhl was one of the most prominent scholars of monosemy. We also cannot leave out the constructed language Lojban , which originated from Loglan , both monosemic; the first was created by the group Logical Language while the second by sociologist James Cooke Brown .