Meaning potentials and context: Some consequences for the analysis of variation in meaning

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a view of word meaning on the type level which is based on "meaning potentials" rather than on reified type meanings founded on either of the two traditional approaches of abstract generalization (Gesamtbedeutung) and typical or basic meaning (Grundbedeutung). It is suggested that actual meaning on the occurrence level is produced by context-sensitive operations of meaning activation and meaning determination which combine meaning potentials with each other and with contextually given information rather than by some simple compositionality operations yielding phrase and sentence meaning from simple type meanings of one of the two traditional kinds. To establish this goal, I first present the traditional notions and discuss some problems which arise when trying to handle variation in meaning. I then specifically discuss the relation of homonymy and polysemy to the traditional notions. In section 3, 1 introduce the notion of "meaning potentials" as an alternative to the traditional notions and then discuss in section 4 how this notion might be used to handle problems of meaning variation, focusing especially on homonymy and polysemy.