Polysemy — the condition of a single sign bearing multiple, related meanings — appears across the depth-psychology corpus in registers that range from technical linguistics to ontological philosophy and neuropsychological critique. Allan’s monograph on the Ancient Greek middle voice treats polysemy as the governing structural principle of a grammatical category: the middle voice is not a family of homonyms but a radially organised complex category whose distinct usage types share prototype-based family resemblances and extend outward through metaphorical and metonymic links. Ricoeur engages polysemy at the level of philosophical anthropology, arguing that the ‘grand words’ of ethics and politics — being, action, liberty, justice — are constitutively polysemic, and that this semantic plurality is not a defect to be overcome but the very condition that permits analogical unity across human experience. Hillman, by contrast, celebrates polysemy as the hallmark of metaphorical or imaginal consciousness: where logical discourse demands univocity, alchemical and archetypal thinking thrives on doublespeak and the inexhaustible resonance of images. McGilchrist situates polysemy neuropsychologically, noting that the left hemisphere treats it as noise and ambiguity to be eliminated, while the right hemisphere recognises it as intrinsic to the texture of natural language and lived reality. Benveniste’s historical-linguistic analyses demonstrate how polysemy accumulates diachronically through ritual, social, and institutional context. Together, these voices frame polysemy as simultaneously a structural, ontological, psychological, and cognitive phenomenon — one whose suppression marks a pathological narrowing of mind.
there is doublespeak, polysemy, going on everywhere. Each thing is a conjunction when consciousness is metaphorical, and there are no halves or realms to be joined.
Hillman argues that metaphorical or imaginal consciousness dissolves the problem of opposition into a condition of ubiquitous polysemy, where every image carries multiple meanings simultaneously.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.
McGilchrist uses the invented language Ithkuil as a reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate that the left hemisphere’s drive to eliminate polysemy from natural language produces an unusable, inhuman result.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.
McGilchrist identifies polysemy as a constitutive feature of natural language that left-hemisphere rationalism pathologically attempts to eradicate.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the analogical unity of action, in order to mark the polysemic character of action and of the acting individual, which the fragmentary nature of these studies has underscored
Ricoeur argues that the analogical unity of human action across its multiple domains is itself grounded in and only legible through the irreducible polysemy of the acting self.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the poly-semy characteristic of what I am calling the grand words of politics is recognized by Aristotle in reference to justice itself, in the first lines of the Nichomachean Ethics 5.
Ricoeur, following Aristotle, identifies polysemy as a fundamental and unavoidable property of the key ethical and political concepts — not a weakness but a structural condition of their scope.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the great polysemy of the term ‘being,’ according to Aristotle, can permit us to give new value to the meaning of being as act and potentiality, securing in this way the analogical unity of acting on a stable ontological meaning.
Ricoeur invokes Aristotle’s polysemy of being as the ontological foundation that enables a unified yet plural account of human action and selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the notion of cause fans out with such polysemy that one can no longer tell if it is the result of incipient anthropomorphism that we see the bulldozer push
Ricoeur observes that the concept of causation is so thoroughly polysemic that it collapses the distinction between mechanical and intentional agency, complicating any account of action.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Assuming that the various middle uses constitute a polysemous structure: in what way are the middle uses related to one another?
Allan frames the central methodological question of his study as one of polysemy: how the discrete uses of the Greek middle voice form a coherent relational network rather than a disordered list of homonyms.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
the strange polysemy of Gothic filhan ‘to bury’ and ‘to entrust, to let out’.
Benveniste demonstrates how specific cultural practices generate historically sedimented polysemy, where a single root accumulates semantically distant but socially contiguous meanings.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
Boundaries between categories are of a flexible and graded nature, and some members are ‘better’ members than others.
Allan deploys prototype theory to explain the internal organisation of a polysemous grammatical category, arguing that meaning-plurality is structured radially around a best exemplar rather than defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
a child in the process of learning the various senses (conventional usages) of the word tree … On the basis of a series of usage events, the child will extract a conception that embodies the commonalities of these trees
Allan uses Langacker’s usage-based model to explain how polysemous categories are acquired through the progressive abstraction of shared features from repeated, contextually specific encounters.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
to establish the category prototype two criteria will be used. The first criterion relates to token-frequency. The higher a member’s frequency of occurrence, the higher its cognitive salience.
Allan proposes token-frequency and network centrality as empirical criteria for identifying the prototypical node within the polysemous structure of the middle voice category.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003aside
the red cock, whose color stands for ‘the blood of witchcraft’ … and to ‘blood’ as a general symbol for aggression, danger, and, in some contexts, ritual impurity.
Turner’s analysis of Ndembu symbolism implicitly enacts the logic of polysemy, showing how a single ritual sign condenses multiple, contextually differentiated meanings within a structured symbolic field.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside