Краткий курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка для студентов неязыковых вузов. Москалёва Е.В. - 64 стр.

            meaning ‘hard outer part of bread’ developed a secondary
            meaning ‘hard part of anything /a pie, a cake/, then the meaning
            ‘harderr layer over soft snow’ was developed, then ‘a sullen
            gloomy person’, then ‘impudence’ were developed. Here the last
            meanings have nothing to do with the primary ones. In such cases
            homonyms appear in the language. It is called the split of
            polysemy.
                  Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and
            notions, as they always contain a generalization of several traits of
            the object. Some of these traits are common with other objects.
            Hence the possibility of identical names for objects possessing
            common features.
                  Thus polysemy is characteristic of most words in many
            languages, however different they may be. But it is more
            characteristic of the English vocabulary as compared with
            Russian, due to the monosyllabic character of English and the
            predominance of root words. The greater the relative frequency of
            the word, the greater the number of elements that constitute its
            semantic structure, i.e. the more polysemantic it is. This regularity
            is of course a statistical, not a rigid one.
                   Word counts show that the total number of meanings
            separately registered in NED for the first thousand of the most
            frequent English words is almost 25, 000, i.e. the average number
            of meanings for each of these most frequent words is 25.
                   Consider some of the variants of a very frequent, and
            consequently polysemantic word run. We define the main variant
            as ‘to go by moving the legs quickly’ as in Tired I was, I began to
            run frantically home. The lexical meaning does not change in the
            forms ran and running. The basic meaning may be extended to
            inanimate things: I caught the bus that runs between C and B; or
            the word run may be used figuratively: It makes the blood run
            cold. Both the components “on foot” and “quickly” are
            suppressed in This self-service shop run by Co-op and The car
            runs on petrol. The idea of motion remains but it is reduced to
            “operate or function”. The difference of meaning is reflected in
            the difference of syntactic valency. It is impossible to use this

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