The use of the polysemous word run by Polish students of English philology

According to Falkum (2011: 9), it is apparent that a single word form can be associated with several different meanings. We may take the selected word for our elaboration, which is run. Its meaning in the verb phrase run a half marathon is apparently different from the one it has in run some water, or, for that matter, in run on gasoline, run on empty, run a shop, run late, run away from responsibilities, run in the family, run for President, etc. This phenomenon, described as polysemy, proliferates in natural languages, including English as well. This is confi rmed by a range of different senses (and/or uses) that any available source, e.g. any dictionary will have listed under a polysemous term a considerable number of its entries. The objective of this article will be the theoretical analysis related to the notion of polysemy. The subsequent sections of the article will comprise the practical demonstration of the results of the corpus study. Its subjects were Polish students of English Philology. The students’ use of a selected polysemous word run was investigated based on the available corpus PELCRA1. The corpus was selected as it is a very reliable source to investigate the use of L2 from the perspective of non-native Polish users of English. To demonstrate how the students comprehend the selected polysemous word run, the extracts from students’ compositions, essays and short stories were analysed in accordance with the occurrence of the word run and supplemented with their performance during the spoken mode. The extracts were subsequently analysed in light of their use and assumed awareness of the investigated word.