Philosphy Seminar Series Contemporary linguists have been impressed by the pervasiveness of polysemy, the sort of lexical ambiguity that goes beyond mere homonymy, whereby the distinct meanings of words are related. For example, instances of ‘bark’ in ‘dogs bark’ and ‘tree bark’ are mere homonyms, while ‘paper’ in ‘Put the paper in the trash’ and ‘She works for the paper’ are polysemes, since their meanings are related.