When we contemplate the variety of “meanings” which a word like 'take' has in English ('take offense', 'take charge', 'take medicine', 'take notice', 'take effect', etc.), we come to the conclusion that this is a case not of abnormally overdeveloped polysemy of a word, but rather of its semantic near-emptiness. In these contexts, 'take' may be said to function as little more than a verbalizer, not quite unlike –'ize' and other affixes. It is preferable to consider the contextual effect illustrated here not as a resolution of polysemy, but as a “depletion” of the designatum [...] Depletion, then, may be defined as a type of polysemy in which designata contain relatively large optional parts whose actualization or non-actualization is determined by precisely delimited contexts. The phenomenon of depletion is surely a semiotic universal, but perhaps its incidence varies in different languages.
- Weinreich (1963), Pag. 144-145