Semantic ambiguity of can in word associations
Semantic ambiguity of can in word associations

Summary/Abstract: The present work tackles some issues about ambiguity in terms of homonymy. As a result of an experiment only two of the meanings of the word ‘can’ are in the focus here. The purpose of the article is to summarize the observations on word associations supplied by means of students’ answers in a method very similar to a free association test. Regardless of the specific modal shades such as permission, ability, possibility, offer, etc. that this particular verb could carry and without having the purpose to give an exhaustive list of meanings, the test supplies information about the related words some of which can come into expressions. They are options of useful phrases that could be taught at school while making schoolchildren acquaintance with multiple meanings of the word ‘can’. The test used in the experiment provides data which is compared to expressions from two corpora (BUY-BNC and Word Neighbors).

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