Polysemy — the condition by which a single linguistic or symbolic form carries multiple, related meanings — occupies an uneven but consequential position across the depth-psychology corpus. Its most systematic treatment appears in Allan's cognitive-linguistic analysis of the Ancient Greek middle voice, where polysemy is not a defect to be resolved but the structural principle through which a grammatical category achieves semantic richness: different middle uses radiate from a prototypical core via extension and elaboration, forming a complex category network rather than a list of homonyms. Ricoeur recruits polysemy philosophically, treating it as an ontological condition of 'grand words' such as being, action, and justice — following Aristotle's recognition that the most fundamental terms of ethics and politics resist univocal definition, their analogical unity preserved precisely through semantic plurality. Hillman, by contrast, celebrates polysemy as the native idiom of metaphorical consciousness: where logical opposition demands resolution, imaginal thinking produces 'doublespeak, polysemy, going on everywhere.' McGilchrist frames polysemy neurologically, identifying it as a feature of the right hemisphere's open, contextual mode of knowing — a feature that left-hemispheric drives toward precision systematically suppress. Benveniste attends to polysemy as a diachronic phenomenon, tracing how single roots ramify across semantically distant domains. The tension running through all these treatments is whether polysemy signals richness or inadequacy — a question the corpus, on balance, resolves in favour of richness.
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 identifies polysemy as the intrinsic condition of metaphorical consciousness, arguing that when thought becomes imaginal rather than logical, multiple meanings do not require unification but are simply the natural texture of perception.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
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 argues that polysemy in Aristotle's category of being is not semantic chaos but the condition for an analogical unity that preserves ontological meaning while accommodating plural actualisations.
, 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, treats polysemy as a structural feature of political and ethical language, meaning that foundational terms such as justice and liberty necessarily carry plural, partially overlapping senses.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
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 — designed to eliminate polysemy — as a reductio ad absurdum demonstrating that the suppression of multiple meanings, however logically motivated, renders language humanly unworkable.
, 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.
A parallel passage confirming that McGilchrist regards the attempt to engineer polysemy out of language as symptomatic of the left hemisphere's misguided demand for determinacy over lived semantic richness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the ontological significance of this metacategory preserve what we have already termed on several occasions the analogical unity of action, in order to mark the polysemic character of action and of the acting individual.
Ricoeur identifies polysemy not as semantic vagueness but as the philosophically appropriate marker of action's analogical unity, whereby a single term ('act') legitimately names a family of related but irreducible phenomena.
, 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 demonstrates that polysemy in the concept of causation creates genuine philosophical ambiguity, blurring the boundary between mechanical and intentional explanation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the custom, described by Tacitus, which the ancient Germans had of burying in the ground anything they wanted to preserve explains the strange polysemy of Gothic filhan 'to bury' and 'to entrust, to let out'.
Benveniste treats polysemy as the diachronic residue of cultural practice, showing how a single verb-root accumulates semantically distant meanings through the extension of a concrete custom into contractual and economic domains.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
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 research question of his monograph in terms of polysemy, treating the Greek middle voice as a complex category whose diverse uses must be understood as related extensions of a common semantic core rather than as arbitrary homonyms.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
Consider a child in the process of learning the various senses (conventional usages) of the word tree. In his early experience, the word is first applied to familiar specimens like oaks, elms, and maples.
Allan illustrates polysemic category-learning through Langacker's prototype semantics, showing how multiple senses of a word are acquired through extension from a concrete initial application rather than through mastery of an abstract definition.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
Boundaries between categories are of a flexible and graded nature, and some members are 'better' members than others. Membership of a category is determined according to the degree of resemblance to a central member, or prototype.
Allan situates polysemy within prototype theory, arguing that the flexible, graded nature of category membership is the structural precondition for a word or grammatical form to sustain multiple related meanings.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003aside