Polysemy in quantitative linguistics

Polysemy is defined in Quantitative Linguistics as the number of different meanings or functions of a linguistic unit.

This concept can be operationalised in different ways, depending on the kind of linguistic unit. E.g., the polysemy of a word may be operationalised as the number of meanings given in a specific dictionary.

The distribution of word and morpheme polysemy in dictionaries and in texts has been investigated as well as the interrelations between polysemy and some other properties of the word or morpheme.