123 On Irregular Polysemy * Gergely Peth Department of German Linguistics, University of Debrecen H-4010 Debrecen, Pf. 47. E-mail: pethog@inf.unideb.hu Most research on polysemy has so far concentrated (for understandable reasons) pri- marily on data which show meaning variation that is in some sense systematic (regu- lar). According to common wisdom, these are the only phenomena in connection with which there is a reasonable chance for meaning variation to be explained and predicted (namely, by revealing its underlying regularities). A general definition of systematic polysemy is commonplace: systematic polysemy involves at least two lexical items (lexemes) which have different readings (or interpretations; these two terms will be used interchangeably throughout this paper), and among these one can distinguish at least two types of reading which occur with each of these lexemes. In other words, the lexemes have several different parallel readings. Let us introduce the term ‘polysemy type’ to designate a particular pattern of (polysemic) meaning variation. There are sev- eral different systematic polysemy types in each language – for example, Peth (2004) presents about sixty (more or less productive ones) in Hungarian nouns. Let us see two examples for such types from English and German, respectively. 1 (1) ’legal relation’ – ’document which proves that this obtains’ Some examples: insurance, permission, agreement, commission, contract (a) ’legal relation’ All employees have the permission to park their vehicles in the parking lot of the company. (b) ’document’ Show me your permission! * Publication of the present paper was supported by the Research Group for Theoretical Lin- guistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the Universities of Debrecen, Pécs and Szeged. The author would like to thank Marina Rakova, Csilla Rákosi, Piroska Kocsány, Mária Ladányi, András Kertész, Péter Csatár and Péter Pelyvás for their helpful comments on different versions of this paper. This research was supported by Grant F42664 of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. 1 In the numbering P indicates a proposition, Q a question, D a definition and plain numbers everything else.