Explaining systematic polysemy: kinds and individuation

Polysemy is a phenomenon involving single lexical items with multiple related senses. Much theorizing about it has focused on developing linguistic accounts that are responsive to various compositional and representational challenges in semantics and psychology. We focus on an underexplored question: Why does systematic polysemy cluster in the ways it does? That is, why do we see certain regular patterns of sense multiplicity, but not others? Drawing on an independently motivated view of kind cognition – i.e. the formal structures for different classes of kind representations – we argue for an answer centered on conceptual individuation. Specifically, we argue that classes of kind concepts vary in what they individuate (i.e. counting as one and specifying what makes it the same or different from others). By elucidating these differences, we can explain why a range of patterns of systematic polysemy are found cross-linguistically and why other patterns are not attested. Overall, our account provides an explanatory framework addressing an important question at the interface between language and mind and opens new avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.