Relations between human beings within society are numerous and rather diverse. However, what unites all these kinds of relations and social co-operations is the uniform and overall necessity to use language for them. As far as the above-mentioned diverse character of the social relations is under discussion, the words acquire new senses or even meanings to serve the purposes of different social groups. Moreover, the etymological history of every single word is of great significance here. As far as in the modern languages, the forms of a word might occur similarly, but their roots might go deep into different directions in the language history. Drawing from these facts, the notion of polysemy appears to be one of the central phenomena in a language. As a result, to carry out the comprehensive analysis of the presented examples (see below), it is necessary to distinguish between numerous types of polysemy and define them as well as polysemy as such in the broadest sense of the word.
Thus, regular polysemy is the notion used to define the state when two or more phonological words or linguistic word forms have different denotative meanings and sometimes different forms, but their etymological features as well as major semantic characteristics are similar or at least closely connected. Moreover, it is traditionally considered to be the form of relations that the lexical units of a single class can be involved in. In other words, nouns can be in polysemantic relations to nouns only, and the categories of other word classes cannot overlap with them. Drawing from this, it can be stated that the polysemantic verbs cannot have similar meanings or senses among nouns, adjectives, and other word classes. However, this point of view has been long doubted, and the recent research works by such prominent linguists as Clifton, Murphy, and many others prove that polysemy is possible on the intercategorial level. In other words, this means that the verb, for example, to school displays certain features and semes of the noun school. Therefore, the relations of polysemy could be established and observed between them.
Accordingly, the examples offered for the analysis in this paper can be treated like ones that are in the relations of regular polysemy, but substantial corrections and exceptions can also be observed in their respect:
- The Smiths keep a pet turkey.
- We had turkey for Christmas dinner.
The first point that should be stated about the above-presented sentences, and especially the nouns turkey in them, is that these words definitely have a common meaning, which is, however, made distant and vague by the senses these lexical units display in different contexts. Moreover, the grammatical peculiarities of the use of these two lexical units, especially those connected with their use in collocations and set expressions, also evidence that the connotative and denotative meanings of the word turkey differ in the two sentences under analysis.
Nevertheless, as has been already stated above, regular polysemy has numerous manifestations, among which morphological, lexico-semantic, and grammatical ones are the most significant. Thus, if viewed from the point of view of the morphological polysemy, the words under consideration are polysemantic, meaning that their morphological structures are similar. The roots and stems of both word forms are similar and allow stating their polysemy at this level of analysis. Moreover, the possibility of derivation from both stems equals zero while no suffixes or inflectional morphemes, if added to the stem turkey, present a meaningful combination of morphological units. And as they are not able to derive other lexical units, the words under consideration are perfect examples of the regular polysemy at its morphological level.
However, if the lexico-semantic level of polysemy is concerned, considerable contradictions come into play. The first thing to mention among them is the different denotative meanings that the words possess. Thus, example a presents turkey as a species of an animal, namely a bird, which is domesticated by human beings and serves as either a pet, which is the case in the sentence considered or as poultry used for consumption or trade. However, if example b is analysed, its denotative meaning turns out to differ. In the second sentence, turkey is understood as a dish that is typically served for the Christmas holidays and is their eternal symbol. Anyway, the semantic similarity between the units still exists. Both words have denotative meanings that are connected to the semantic fields of animals and food.
Finally, in the grammatical context, these lexical units are different. Example a, as a concrete class noun which is countable, is used with the indefinite article in its specifying meaning to indicate a phenomenon that is new in this context. At the same time, b example is the concrete class noun, which can be treated as either an uncountable noun or a noun whose plural form is homonymous to singular. Thus, the analysis of the sentences allows concluding that the words turkey in them are in relation to regular polysemy on its morphological, semantic and grammatical levels.