Talk:Semantic overload

eg. live: is this a overloaded word? --Manueljoe (talk) 13:13, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

References and possible OR

Despite the article's claim that this is a term used in linguistics, I have never encountered it being used as a term of art in that field, and don't even appear to be terms of art in the (few) works that do use it. The few mentions are in-passing N+N phrases, not necessarily any more notable than any other pairs of nouns, and the sources also have little to do with the article as written. For example:

• Agard's A Course in Romance Linguistics: A Diachronic View (1984) uses it once, to refer to an intonation contour adding meaning to an utterance, rather than confusing it.
• Robert's "Cognitive Invariants and Linguistic Variability" (1999) again uses it just once, and to refer to potential polysemy of words in isolation, which is reduced by their appearance in an utterance.
• Iordan and Orr's An Introduction to Romance Linguistics (1937) uses it twice in the sense of polysemy, but also wrapped up with things that play no part in modern linguistics - "worn out and jaded" words, "diseased" semantics, etc.
• McLeod's "Faclair na Pàrlamaid: A Critical Evaluation" uses it repeatedly as a term for polysemy, but restricted to the context of Galic language planning for terms in official documents.

In any event, none of the above have anything to do with expletives, "information overload", etc.

Given this, and that the article cites no sources, it really seems to be nothing else than an individual editor's idiosyncratic term for polysemy, with significant OR thrown in. Given this, the article should probably be redirected to polysemy, or else rewritten to explain the apparent use of "semantic overload" in fields besides linguistics - in a Google search it seems to pop up a bit in computer science and philosophy, though I have no idea if those uses are common or notable. Ergative rlt (talk) 05:04, 22 September 2010 (UTC)