Representation of Polysemous Words in the Lexicon

The article presents the results of a psycholinguistic experiment aimed at identifying the way of revealing of polysemantic content in an individual vocabulary. The results of the study have shown that a native speaker needs no extended definition storage to operate and store the meanings of polysemants. The paper supports the main principles of the semantic theory that we are evolving which consists in the fact that a minimum of general features is sufficient to under-stand the meaning in a communicative time trouble (if it is required to understand the semantics of a word, for example, a concept). A rapid access to the meaning can be provided by dominant semantic features of a general nature, representing all the meanings of a word, summarizing its semantics. A particular contextual meaning, like a vague formation, is formed in consciousness at the time of speech, conforming to a specific linguistic situation. To identify it in the process of communicative time trouble, a minimum number of features, often general, is sufficient. The ex-periment is also aimed at verification of the cluster-invariant structure of polysemants, identifica-tion of the network model of the lexicon organization and semantic structure, identification of the dominant elements of the word structure, algorithms for decoding figurative meanings.