The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

In the mind of an Arabic speaker, the wa- in lists and the wa- at the start of a sentence are not different senses.  They are the same logical conjunction marker.  Like in English "Take the book and the pen" and "Take the book and read it"

The English is actually a fairly typical example of polysemy for function words, and my understanding of the Arabic is much same. Taking two objects together and doing two actions are different things, but there is a shared sense of coordination between them. But I really only emphasized the term to emphasize that I'd anticipated this, and that in that post I said it would need to be accounted for. Which brings me to the question I asked that seems to be the heart of the matter even if you insist on a definition of polysemy that excludes this example:

This...use puts a predictable and testable constraint on which paragraphs can match. Is that borne out in your findings?