The only problem I have with this is the implicit assumption that
the senses given in published dictionaries are disjoint. Since
the senses are often not disjoint, any ambiguity resolution which
always chooses exactly one active sense is inherently wrong in any
case where more than one sense applies.
To take an example with the word STOCK we've been discussing so much
here: In the sentence 'They had acquired 48.5 per cent of Continental's
stock', does STOCK take the sense 'shares which are large parts of the
ownership of a company ... and which can be bought as an investment'?
Or the sense 'the amount of money which the company has through selling
shares to people'? (Both definitions are from CoBuild.)
It seems to me that both senses apply.
The situation is even clearer in the case of a word like German
'Pflanze', which is used by farmers to refer to their crops, but by
biologists to refer to all objects which are neither animals nor
minerals, whether planted intentionally as a crop or not. (The tree in
front of the farmhouse is a plant only in the second sense; the wheat in
the field is a plant in both senses.)
-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen