meaning - When a single use of a word has more than one word-sense (or part of speech) in the same sentence


Consider the sentence:



John used to work for the newspaper that you are reading."



(source)


Newspaper has several well-known senses. The two that occur here are the sense of the newspaper, as a company:



John used to work for the newspaper



and the newspaper as the physical object:



the newspaper that you are reading.



It should be readily apparent that John never worked for that ink-on-died-wood-pulp in front of you. It should also be clear that you are not reading a company. In the first sentence though, the word takes both senses at the same time.


@Nigelj provided another example:



I was going to dust but there wasn't any



Here, dust is first used as a verb, then as a noun. So not only a different word sense, but even a different part of speech.


I am looking for a name for this occurrence, so I can look it up in a reference book / textbook. It is of interest to me as it is a case that is often neglected by computational word sense disambiguation systems.


Terms that I have already considered, and that are not (to my knowledge) correct for describing this:



  • polyseme / homonym : a word holding multiple senses at the same time can of-course only occur with words that have multiple senses in the first place. But not all uses of words with multiple senses exhibit the behavior.

  • Syntactic ambiguity/amphiboly/amphibology: this sentence is un-ambigious. It only has one interpretation.

  • Antanaclasis: the word newspaper is only used once, but with two meanings.

  • Pun: pun's generally rely on two different interpretations of the word, separately to give the sentence two possible meanings. Not at the same same time to give the sentence 1 meaning (also they tend to be funny)

  • -


Answer



I think you're referring to the term zeugma.



zeugma noun A figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g. John and his driving licence expired last week). - ODO



The dictionary entry also references the term syllepsis:



syllepsis noun A figure of speech in which a word is applied to two others of which it grammatically suits only one (e.g. neither they nor it is working). - ODO



Both terms are referenced in the following entry:



In rhetoric, zeugma (/ˈzuːɡmə/ ... or /ˈzjuːɡmə/; from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together") and syllepsis (/sɪˈlɛpsɪs/; from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, sullēpsis, lit. "a taking together") are figures of speech in which one single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence. - wikipedia



Here are a couple of examples from yourdictionary.com:



  • "The farmers in the valley grew potatoes, peanuts, and bored." (Wunderland)

  • "She opened her door and her heart to the orphan." (Wunderland)


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