ABSTRACT
In 1976, when Miller and Johnson-Laird published on “psycholexicology”, polysemy was a topic that was judiciously avoided. It was assumed that words have certain core senses, and that the semantic decomposition of those senses would cast interesting light on the minds that use them. Although polysemy seemed peripheral to that analytic enterprise, in the closing pages of the book a careful reader will find this admission: “We have relied on incomplete definitions to give us the larger dimensions of lexical organization and have tried to leave open the question of how best to account for polysemy” (Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976, p.677).
