POLYSEMY and HOMONYMY

The problem of meanings’ relationships gives rise to the subdivision of the vocabulary into several groups. At first we may single out monosemantic (having one meaning - namely scientific terms: oxygen, molecule) and polysemantic words,and very close to them are homonyms - words identical in sound-form but different in meaning.

Polysemy is the existence within one word of several connected meanings. The whole complex of these meanings forms the semantic structure of the given words. The problem of polysemy is mainly the problem of interrelation and interdependence of various meanings of one and the same word, which is called polysemantic.

Polysemy viewed diachronically is a historical change in the semantic structure of the word resulting in disappearance of some meanings or in the new meanings being added to the ones already existing and also in the rearrangement of these meanings in its semantic structure

The word table has at least nine meanings: a piece of furniture; the persons seated at the table; the food put on the table; a thin flat piece of stone, metal, wood (плита); slabs of stone; words cut into them or written on them - ten tables (десять заповедей); an orderly arrangements of facts; part of a machine-tool to put the work to operate on (стол станка); a level area (плато). Diachronically the word meaning a thin flat piece of stone is a nominative meaning, all the others being derived from it (they are nominative-derivative meanings).

Polysemy viewed synchronically is understood as co-existence of the various meanings of the same word at a certain period of time and the rearrangement of these meanings in the semantic structure of the word. The meaning having the highest frequency is synchronically its central meaning (a table - a piece of furniture).

As the semantic structure is never static the relationships between the diachronic and synchronic evaluation of the individual meanings of the same word may be different in different periods of historical development of language.

The whole of the semantic structure of correlated polysemantic words of different languages can never be identical. Words are felt as correlated if their nominative meanings coincide (стол: предмет обстановки; застолье; пища; плита; скрижали; заповеди; таблица; планшайба; плато; стол заказов, адресный стол ( пища в рус. - нейтр., в англ. - разг .)

The word polysemantic in a language in actual speech is always monosemantic because of the collocation of words and the context, in other words only some meanings of polysemantic words are representatives of the word in isolation, others are perceived only in a certain context.

Polysemy and Context.

The notion of context has several interpretations. According to N.N.Amosova context is a combination of an indicator (indicating minimum) and the dependent (the word the meaning of which is to be rendered in a given utterance). Contextual analysis studies the interpretation of a polysemantic word within the framework of syntactic configuration and lexical environment. Roughly contexts may be grouped into lexical and grammatical (syntactical, morphological and mixed).

Lexical context determines the meaning of the word black as the colour opposite to white when it is used with a key-word naming some material thing [ black gloves, black cat ]; when used with a key-word denoting feeling or thought it means sad, dismay [ black despair, black thought ]; with nouns denoting time the meaning is unhappy [ black day, black period ].

A purely syntactic context is rare. As a rule, the indication comes from syntactic and lexical factors combined [ late when used predicatively means after the right, expected or fixed time as to be late for school; when used attributively with words denoting period of time it means towards the end of the period - in late summer; used with proper personal name and preceded with a definite article late means recently dead ].

The meaning of a polysemantic word can be also influenced by the situations of different types. In text situations a preceding description or a description that follows helps us to understand word-meaning. Life situations are extra-linguistic. Situations differ from the context as their basic units are different: in contexts necessary indication comes from a sentence, in situations - from a part of a text outside.

The Definition of Homonyms. The sources of Homonymy.

Homonyms are defined as words that have the same sound-form but different meanings and are not connected semantically. The problem of homonymy is namely the problem of differentiation between two different semantic structures of identically sounding words.

The two main sources of homonymy are: diverging meaning development of a polysemantic word and convergent sound development of two or more different words. The first process can be observed in case of the split of polysemy when different meanings of the same word move so far away from each other that can be regarded as two separate words (flower - flour have the same origin OF flor, L florem). The second process leads to a coincidence of two or more words which were phonetically distinct at an earlier date (O Norman) ras and Fr. race: race - бега, race - раса; OE ic -I, eoge - eye).

The processes of shortening and conversion are also the sources of homonymy (fan - веер, fan - фанат [ fantastic ]).

The Classification of Homonyms.

The most widely excepted classification is that recognising homonyms proper (perfect homonyms)[ words identical in graphic form and sound-form - case:случай; case: кейс ]; homophones [words having the same sound-form but different spelling - son, sun; see, sea); homographs [words having the same graphic form but different in pronunciation - tear: слеза, tear: тащить).

Homonymy of words and homonymy of individual word-forms may be regarded as full (words belonging to the same part of speech and therefore having the same paradigm - seal: печать - seal: тюлень) and partial (words belonging to different parts of speech and having different paradigms [ to know - no; knew - new ], or words belonging to the same part of speech homonymous in some forms of their paradigms [ to found: основывать - found: нашел; to lie: лежать - to lie: лгать ]).

Homonymous words and word-forms may be classified by the type of meaning into: lexical, grammatical, lexical-grammatical. Lexical homonyms are words of the same part of speech but of quite different lexical meanings having no semantic relations between them (match: спичка - match: матч; peace: мир - piece: кусок). Grammatical homonyms are words of different grammatical meaning (brother’s - brothers). Lexical-grammatical homonyms are words of different parts of speech having different grammatical and different lexical meaning (seals (тюлени) - seals (ставит печать) or words of the same part of speech (to found: основывать - found: нашел).

A number of lexical-grammatical homonyms have related lexical meanings. These are homonyms formed by conversion pairs (work - to work). The peculiarity of this kind of homonyms is shown by the term patterned homonymy.

The Differentiation between Homonymy and Polysemy.

As both in case of polysemy and in case of homonymy the same sound form expresses different meanings, there arises the problem of the demarcation line between homonymy and polysemy - between different meanings of one word and the meanings of two or more different words.

Nowadays there’s no reliable criterion for differentiating between the meanings of a polysemantic word and lexical homonymy. Synchronically the differentiation between homonymy and polysemy is as a rule based on the semantic criterion. However, this criterion which is reduced to this distinguishing between words that have nothing in common semantically and those that have something in common and therefore must be taken as lexical units, is very vague and subjective.

I.V.Arnold thinks that the most reliable criterion is the one of the explanatory transformations. The thing is that a definition of a word in explanatory dictionaries consists of words each of which expresses this or that component in the semantic structure of a given word. Different meanings are expressed by means of different words. If different meanings can be defined with the help of an identical word-group, they may be regarded as lexico-semantical variants of the same polysemantic word; if not, they are homonyms (voice: «sound made when speaking or singing» [ a child’s voice ]; «a manner of speaking» [ cultured voice ]; «sound produced by vibration of vocal cords» [ b, d, z ]; the contrast of active and passive [ залог ]. The first three definitions contain one and the same element rendering the common basis of their meaning, but it is impossible to use the same element for the fourth meaning; this sets the forth meaning apart. So we may consider voice as залог the homonym of the polysemantic word voice the central meaning of which being голос.)

The criterion of distribution suggested by some linguists is undoubtfully helpful in case of lexico-grammatical and grammatical homonymy (in the homonymic pair paper - to paper the noun may be preceded by the article, and to paper can never be found in such distribution). But this criterion fails in case of lexical homonymy. Lexical context serves to differentiate lexical meanings, but it is of little help in distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy since different distributions may be characteristic both of lexical homonyms and of various meanings of the same word (the meanings of polysemantic word wit - остроумие and остряк differ in their distribution).

The criterion of spelling serves to discriminate lexical homonyms different in their graphical forms (night-knight).

It should be noted that there are cases of lexical homonymy when none of the criteria enumerated is of any use. In such cases the demarcation line between homonymy and polysemy is rather flexible.

N.B. Gvishiani suggests such criteria of differentiation polysemy and homonymy as the semantic proximity of the lexical semantic variants ( when it is possible to discover a central meaning which brings the lexical-semantic variants under a single general notion as in the expressions he touched her hand, a new hired hand, it is made by hand as distinct from the hands of the clock referring to a different object), their derivational capacity (charge: заряд, charge: цена have different derivative words charger: зарядное устройство, chargeable: дорогой), the range of collocability (the word-combinations of the homonyms charge: цена, charge: напутствие судьи присяжным arequite apart 1) free of charge, at no extra charge, 2) press charges, drop the charges)

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