The problem of differentiating polysemy and homonymy in english

The majority of content words do not have a single meaning for each; rather they associate to a number of senses. When these senses are semantically incompatible in non-neutral contexts, they are then homonymous; otherwise, they are polysemous 35 where polysemous words have an underspecified meaning that encompasses their different senses. To reliably differentiate between these two lexical relations helps very much in the improvement of the retrieval process. In this orientation, this article highlights the concepts of homonymy and polysemy, as they constitute one of the central issues in semantics and the psychology of word meaning.