Homonymy in English. Polysemy vs homonymy

Homonyms are words that sound alike but have different semantic structure. The problem of homonymy is mainly the problem of differentiation between two different semantic structures of identically sounding words.

Sources:

- from a change in pronunciation and/or spelling (sea-see)

- loss of endings (love-to love from [lufu]-[luvian])

- borrowings (bank“shore”-bank“financial institution”)

- shortening (fan from fanatic- fan from ME fr. fann)

- diverging meaning development of a polysemantic word (bachelor-1. a young night who follows the banner of another, 2. the lowest university degree, 3. a male of a seal not having a mate during a breeding time)

- euphemisms

- across different dialects and variants of the lang (the same form does not have the same meaning (Am biscuit- Br cookie)

Classification:

(the type of coincidence)

-homophones (are words identical in sound-form but different both in spelling and in meaning, e.g. sea n and see v; son n and sun n.)

-homographs (live[liv]- live[laiv])

-perfect homonyms (are words identical both in spelling and in sound-form but different in meaning, e.g. case₁ n -’something that has happened’ and case₂ n -‘a box, a container’)

(the type of meaning)

- lexical homonyms (seal₁ denotes ‘a sea animal’, ‘the fur of this animal’, etc., seal₂ — ‘a design printed on paper, the stamp by which the design is made’)

-grammatical homonyms (differ only in gramm meaning(seals- pl of “sea animal”; seal’s- sing Poss case)

-lexical-grammatical homonyms (seal(n)- seal(v))

Polysemy vs homonymy

The most debatable problem of homonymy is the demarcation line “between homonymy and polysemy, i.e. between different meanings of one word and the meanings of two or more phonemically different words.If homonymy is viewed diachronically then all cases of sound convergence of two or more words may be safely regarded as cases of homonymy, as, e.g., race₁ and race₂ can be traced back to two etymologically different words. Synchronically the differentiation between homonymy and polysemy is as a rule based on the semantic criterion. It is usually held that if a connection between the various meanings is apprehended by the speaker, these are to be considered as making up the semantic structure of a polysemantic word, otherwise it is a case of homonymy, not polysemy. The criteria used in the synchronic analysis of homonymy are:

1) the semantic criterion of related or unrelated meanings;

2) the criterion of spelling;

3) the criterion of distribution.

2 major criteria for differentiating:

-etymological (uses history of world origin)

-psychological (is based on decisions of subjects in psychological experiments)

8 Semantic & non-semantic classifications of English words

Present days semantic theory focuses on synchronic relations in the language system. It’s concerned both with:

1. relations within language (sense relations = semantic relations = semasiology)

2. relations between language and the word

When we talk about the semantic structure of the lexicon we are referring to the network of relationships which buying lexemes together and enable us to perceive the lexicon of the language as a system.

The major of linguistic agree on one point: voc-ry should be studied as a system or as a set of interrelated sub-system.

No lexeme exists in isolation. There is no lexeme without relation. When linguists studied the semantic structure of the lexicon they are trying to expound all the relationships of meaning that relate lexemes to reach other. Because of the size and complexity of the English language very little of the structure has been described. Descriptive task remains because the size of the lexicon system is changing, rearrangement.

Semantic relations:

1 polysemantic relations - the relations between the meanings of the word;

2 synonymic relations - there are no lexemes which have exactly the same meaning (linguistically)

- ideоgraphiс synonyms (house)

- Contextual or context-dependent synonyms are similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions. It may happen that the difference between the meanings of two words is contextually neutralised

- relative synonyms-: the words name different notions, not various degrees of the same notion, and cannot substitute one another. like:: love:: adore or gift:: talent:: genius

- Total synonymy, i.e. synonymy where the members of a synonymic group can replace each other in any given context, without the slightest alteration in denotative or emotional meaning and connotations, is a rare occurrence. Examples of this type can be found in special literature among technical terms

3 antonymic relations - Antonyms may be defined as two or more words of the same language belonging to the same part of speech and to the same semantic field.

- Gradable - capable of comparison, they don’t refer to absolute qualities: happy – sad, wet – dry BUT: single – marry, alive – dead we can’t use term gradable as they are contradictories.

- Converses - (sell – buy, husband - wife)

- Contradictory notions are mutually opposed and denying one another, e. g. alive means ‘not dead’ and impatient means ‘not patient’.

- Contrary notions are also mutually opposed but they are gradable, e. g. old and young are the most distant elements of a series like: old:: middle-aged:: young,

Non-semantic grouping is used in all branches of applied linguistics in the alphabetical organization of written words in most dictionaries. By a lexico-grammatical group we understand a class of words, which have a common lexico-grammatical meaning, a common paradigm, the same substituting elements and possibly a characteristic set of suffixes rendering the lexico-grammatical meaning. These groups are subsets of the parts of speech. Thus English nouns are subdivided into lexico-grammatical groups:personal names animal manes collective names for people collective names for animal abstract nouns material nouns object nouns proper names for people toponymic proper nouns.

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