Referring to Institutional Entities: Semantic and Ontological Perspectives
Résumé
Systematic polysemy is currently at the front stage of lexical semantics debates, a pervasive phenomenon often described as governed by general patterns of extralinguistic conceptual organization of the world. Focussing on the case of institutiondenoting terms, this paper argues that such multiple-meaning phenomena take root in the complex ontological structure of the denoted entities. Drawing on a rich ontological literature on constitution and institutional entities, it is argued that these phenomena should be viewed as the semantic appraisal of the fundamentally stratified nature of institutions, grounded in heterogeneous ontological strata.
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