 A brief terminological point: ‘polysemy’ refers to a phenomenon that is closely related to ambiguity, but often is characterized as a term with multiple meanings that are, in some hard to specify sense, interestingly related. For example, ‘in’ is often thought to be a paradigm of polysemy: to be in a car, in my thoughts and in trouble seem to play on notions of containment but there is clearly a difference in how we interpret ‘in’ in each case. It is sometimes characterized as a phenomenon subsumable under ambiguity (basically, an ambiguity with the meanings that are tightly related meanings) but sometimes it is taken to be a different phenomenon altogether. One traditional carving is that ambiguity in words is a matter of two or more lexical entries that correspond to the same word and polysemy a single lexeme that has multiple meanings.[2] For the rest of this article, I will assume that polysemy is simply ambiguity with tightly corresponding meanings and I will not try to distinguish polysemy from ambiguity very carefully.  Many cognitive linguists contend that there there is no principled way to divide these in any case. It’s worth noticing that terms could be both ambiguous and polysemous if it had three meanings, two of which were suitably related and one which was quite far apart from the other two. See Vicente and Falkum (2017) for a detailed look at polysemy.  