Abstract

The paper examines the role of systemic-functional analysis in the interpretation of polysemous verbs. Polysemous verbs may exhibit ambiguity in that the same form realizes multiple senses. A specific linguistic context, such as a clause, as an explicit lexical and syntactic environment, resolves the ambiguity. The analysis of a number of English examples is presented to illustrate that certain senses of the given verb may presuppose a distinct process type, from a systemic-functional point of view, and that the immediate syntactic environments differ considerably