THE ORIGIN OF HOMONYMS. The intense development of homonymy in the English language is obviously due not to one single factor but to several interrelated causes

The intense development of homonymy in the English language is obviously due not to one single factor but to several interrelated causes, such as the monosyllabic character of English and its analytic structure.

Homonyms can appear in the language not only as a result of the split of polysemy, but also as a result of levelling of grammar inflexions, when different parts of speech become identical in their outer aspect, e.g. care from caru and care from carian. They can also be formed by means of conversion, e.g. to slim from slim, to water from water. They can be formed with the help of the same suffix from the same stem, e.g. reader - a person mho reads and a book for reading. They can be the result of forming splinters (splinters-are the result of clipping the end or the beginning of a word and producing a number of new words) and lexical abbreviations, e.g. bio - a splinter with the meaning biology, biological as in the word biometrics; bio - a combining form with the meaning life as in the word biology; bio - a lexical shortening of the word biography with the meaning a short biography.

Homonyms can also appear in the language accidentally, when two words coincide in their development, e.g. two native words can coin­cide in their outer aspects: to bear from beran (to carry) and bear from bera (an animal). A native word and a borrowing can coincide in their outer aspects, e.g. fair from Latin feria and fair from native fager (blond). Two bor­rowings can coincide, e.g. base from the French base (Latin basis) and base (low) from the Latin bas (Italian basso).

Homonyms can develop through shorten­ing of different words, e.g. cab from cabrio­let, cabbage, cabin, COD from Concise Oxford Dictionary and cash on delivery.

The abundance (изобилие) of homonyms is also closely connected with such a characteristic feature of the English language as the phonetic identity of word and stem or, in other words, the predominance of free forms among the most frequent roots. It is quite obvious that if the frequency of words stands in some inverse relationship to their length, the monosyllabic words will be the most frequent. Moreover, as the most frequent words are also highly polysemantic, it is only natural that they develop meanings which in the course of time may deviate very far from the central one. When the intermediate links fall out, some of these new meanings lose all connections with the rest of the structure and start a separate existence. The phenomenon is known as disintegration or split of polysemy.

Different causes by which homonymy may be brought about are subdivided into two main groups:

1) homonymy through convergent (сходящийся в одной точке) sound development, when two or three words of different origin accidentally coincide in sound;

2) homonymy developed from polysemy through divergent расходящийся (в разные стороны) sense development. Both may be combined with loss of endings and other morphological processes.

3) It must be noted, however, that though the number of examples in which a process of this sort could be observed is considerable, it is difficult to establish exact criteria by which disintegration of polysemy could be detected. The whole concept is based on stating whether there is any connection between the meanings or not.

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