Learn English – What do you call a word that has multiple senses or parts of speech in one sentence

ambiguitymeaningparts-of-speechpolysemesterminology

Consider the following sentence.

John used to work for the newspaper that you are reading.

(It has been collected from here.)

"Newspaper" has several well-known senses.

Newspaper could mean a company:

John used to work for the newspaper.

It could also mean the physical object:

the newspaper that you are reading.

It should be readily apparent that John never worked for that ink-on-died-wood-pulp in front of you.
It should also be clear that you are not reading a company.
In the first sentence, though, the word seems to take both senses at the same time.

@Nigelj provided another example:

I was going to dust but there wasn't any

Here, dust is first used as a verb and then as a noun—not only having a different word sense but also being a different part of speech.

I am looking for a name for this occurrence to look it up in a reference book or textbook.
It is of interest to me because it is a case that is often neglected by computational word-sense-disambiguation systems.

Terms that I have considered but are not (to my knowledge) correct for describing this:

  • polyseme / homonym : a word holding multiple senses at the same time can of-course only occur with words that have multiple senses in the first place. But not all uses of words with multiple senses exhibit the behavior.
  • Syntactic ambiguity/amphiboly/amphibology: this sentence is un-ambigious. It only has one interpretation.
  • Antanaclasis: the word newspaper is only used once, but with two meanings.
  • Pun: pun's generally rely on two different interpretations of the word, separately to give the sentence two possible meanings. Not at the same same time to give the sentence 1 meaning (also they tend to be funny)

Best Answer

I think you're referring to the term zeugma.

zeugma noun A figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g. John and his driving licence expired last week). - ODO

The dictionary entry also references the term syllepsis:

syllepsis noun A figure of speech in which a word is applied to two others of which it grammatically suits only one (e.g. neither they nor it is working). - ODO

Both terms are referenced in the following entry:

In rhetoric, zeugma (/ˈzuːɡmə/ ... or /ˈzjuːɡmə/; from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together") and syllepsis (/sɪˈlɛpsɪs/; from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, sullēpsis, lit. "a taking together") are figures of speech in which one single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence. - wikipedia

Here are a couple of examples from yourdictionary.com:

  • "The farmers in the valley grew potatoes, peanuts, and bored." (Wunderland)
  • "She opened her door and her heart to the orphan." (Wunderland)