O {sensie} z perspektywy semantyki
About {sense} from the perspective of semantics

Summary/Abstract: Although most of my publications in the recent years have been devoted to describing expressions communicating lack of sense, in this article I focus on the term of sense in its positive dimension: the analysis of situations where it is said that something makes sense. My reflections are concerned with the reference of the linguistic unit {coś ma sens} (‘something makes sense’), i.e. such uses of it where one predicates something about activities other than speaking (metalinguistic applications of it are the subject of a separate work, see Wołk 2010). Because of the multiplicity of contexts in which sens appears, the context of usage is commonly and easily equated with meaning, which results in an implicit, if not explicit, claim that sens is a polysemous expression (see definitions in dictionaries of modern Polish and in J. Pelc (1981)). In the present consideration the recognition of the meaning of the unit {coś ma sens} is accompanied by an attempt to answer a few questions: is it justified, and necessary to explicate the word sens in terms of several different units? Would it not be possible to find a common denominator of the meanings which are present in different appearances of this expression? Is its polysemy on the level of predicating it about activities a real fact or an illusion?

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