Questões de Concurso

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Analyze the semantic aspects below:
An English semantics professor is teaching a graduate seminar on polysemy and context-dependent meaning using culinary vocabulary from the recipe. The professor highlights the word "tender" in the instruction "cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until just tender" and asks students to analyze its semantic range across different contexts: "tender meat," "a tender moment," "legal tender," "tender loving care," and "tender one's resignation." When discussing how context disambiguates polysemous meanings and how semantic features shift across different domains (physical texture, emotional quality, monetary function, affectionate care, formal offering), which linguistic analysis demonstrates the most sophisticated understanding of lexical semantics?

(a)

Each use of "tender" represents completely unrelated homonyms with no semantic connections, simply coincidentally sharing the same phonological form in English through historical accident.

(b)

"Tender" exemplifies radical polysemy with multiple related senses forming a semantic network; culinary "tender" denotes desirable texture achieved through proper cooking, sharing semantic features of gentleness and yielding quality with other senses, though each context activates different semantic components.

(c)

"Tender" has one core literal meaning (physical softness) from which all other uses metaphorically derive through systematic cognitive processes of conceptual mapping from concrete source domains to abstract target domains.

(d)

The word "tender" in recipes should be avoided entirely because its polysemous nature creates unavoidable ambiguity that prevents readers from understanding whether the instruction refers to texture, emotion, or monetary transactions.