English words are polysemantic — they possess more than 1 meaning.
Polysemy is diachronic terms implies that a word may retain its previous meanings and at the same time acquire 1 or several new ones.
Synchronically polysemy is understood as the co-existence of various meanings of the same word at a certain historical perioud of time.
The concepts of central or basic meaning and marginal or minor meanings may be interpreted in terms of their relative frequency and speech. It means that the meaning with the highest frequency value is synchronically its basic meaning. There is an approach of formallogical relations among the meanings. According to this approach there are 2 types of possible relations: radial and chain relation.
Radial relation implies that any 2 meanings have a common part. The common part is called an invariantcommon meaning. Chain relation is where the 1st and the 3rd components have nothing in common but they are connected only through the 2nd. Both types of relations are possible simultaneously — it is called the semantic network of meanings.
