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Some words have more potential than others for polysemy or polysemic development. »Etiolate« as compared to »Uxorious«, for instance. This is due in part to their combinatorial possibility with other words in creative sentences (as opposed to standard or cliché uses). But even »uxorious« is bisemic, although the dictionary fails to mark the difference between »being excessively fond of« and »being excessively submissive to« (a wife). The test, as always in semantics and linguistics, is substitution. None of the four senses or »fond« can be construed as equivalent to »submissive«. Polysemic potential can be assimilated with the contextual capacity of a word, and can be seen as the application of a given context to the word in question, in a relationship similar to that of argument and predicate.
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