A contrastive study of heterosemy representation in Modern French dictionaries: A perspective from Two-Level Lexical Categorization Theory

Abstract

Heterosemy is a highly controversial topic in linguistic research. It is often assumed that heterosemous/multi-category lexemes are infrequent in Modern French, but Wang (2023b) has found, based on Le Petit Robert de la langue française , that there are 3990 French heterosemous lexemes of 36 types. From the perspective of the Two-Level Lexical Categorization Theory, this study aims to conduct a contrastive survey on heterosemy representation between two authoritative French dictionaries by building a LAROUSSE Database and contrasting the results reported in Wang (2023b). It is found that although the overall heterosemy representation in the two dictionaries shows a high similarity, there are obvious differences in three dimensions: total number and types of heterosemous lexemes as well as the heterosemous lexemes corresponding to the shared types, among which the divergence rate of the lexemes belonging to 2 word classes is as high as 47.70 %, with that of the lexemes belonging to 3 word classes even reaching 68.89 %. The deep-seated reason for these differences may lie in the fact that the two dictionaries are partly influenced by scientism in their lexical categorization.