Лекции по "Английскому языку"

HOMONYMY

 

1. The notion of homonymy.
2. Classification of homonyms and their sources.
3. Homonymy treated Synchronically

 

1. The notion of homonymy.

In a simple code each sign has only one meaning, and each meaning is associated with only one sign. This one-to-one relationship is not realised in natural languages. When several related meanings are associated with the same group of sounds within one part of speech, the word is called polysemantic, when two or more unrelated meanings are associated with the same form — the words are homonyms, when two or more different forms are associated with the same or nearly the same denotative meanings — the words are synonyms.

Actually, if we describe the lexical system according to three distinctive features, each of which may be present or absent, we obtain 2³ = 8 possible combinations. To represent these the usual tables with only horizontal and vertical subdivisions are inadequate, so we make use of a mapping technique developed for simplifying logical truth functions by E.W. Veitch that proved very helpful in our semantic studies.

In the table below a small section of the lexico-semantic system of the language connected with the noun sound (as in sound of laughter) is represented as a set of oppositions involving phonetical form, similar lexical meaning and grammatical part-of-speech meaning. Every pair of words is contrasted according to sameness or difference in three distinctive features at once.

A maximum similarity is represented by square 1 containing the lexico-semantic variants of the same word. All the adjoining squares differ in one feature only. Thus squares 1 and 2 differ in part of speech meaning only. Some dictionaries as, for instance “Thorndike Century Junior Dictionary” even place sound₁ and sounds₃ in one entry. On the other hand, we see that squares 2, 3 and 4 represent what we shall call different types of homonymy. Square 7 presents words completely dissimilar according to the distinctive features chosen. Square 5 is a combination of features characteristic not only of synonyms but of other types of semantic similarity that will be discussed later on. But first we shall concentrate on homonyms, i.e. words characterised by phonetic coincidence and semantic differentiation.

Two or more words identical in sound and spelling but different in meaning, distribution and (in many cases) origin are called homonyms. The term is derived from Greek homonymous (homos ‘the same' and onoma ‘name’) and thus expresses very well the sameness of name combined with the difference in meaning.

There is an obvious difference between the meanings of the symbol fast in such combinations as run fast ‘quickly’ and stand fast ‘firmly’. The difference is even more pronounced if we observe cases where fast is a noun or a verb as in the following proverbs: A clean fast is better than a dirty breakfast. Who feasts till he is sick, must fast till he is well. Fast as an isolated word, therefore, may be regarded as a variable that can assume several different values depending on the conditions of usage, or, in other words, distribution. All the possible values of each linguistic sign are listed in dictionaries. It is the duty of lexicographers to define the boundaries of each word, i.e. to differentiate homonyms and to unite variants deciding in each case whether the different meanings belong to the same polysemantic word or whether there are grounds to treat them as two or more separate words identical in form. In speech, however, as a rule only one of all the possible values is determined by the context, so that no ambiguity may normally arise. There is no danger, for instance, that the listener would wish to substitute the meaning 'quick’ into the sentence: It is absurd to have hard and fast rules about anything (Wilde), or think that fast rules here are ‘rules of diet’. Combinations when two or more meanings are possible are either deliberate puns, or result from carelessness.

 

 

 

SIMILAR LEXICAL MEANING			DIFFERENT LEXICAL MEANING
SIMILAR SOUND FORM	1. Polysemy	2.Patterned Homonymy	3. Partial Homonymy	4.Full Homonymy
		sound2 n : : sound2 n sound2 as in : a vowel sound	sound1 n : : sounds3 sounds as in: to sound a trumpet	sound1 n : : sound4 a sound4 as in: sound argument	sound1 n: : sound5 n sound5 as in: Long Island Sound
DIFFERENT SOUND FORM	5.Synonymy and Hyponymy	6. Word-Family	7. Any English Words	8. Words of the Same Part of Speech
		sound1: : noise sound1:: whistle	sound1 n soundless a soundproof a sound3 v	sound n simple a	sound n simplicity n
		SAME PART OF SPEECH	DIFFERENT PART OF SPEECH		SAME PART OF SPEECH

 

Both meanings of liver, i.e. ‘a living person’ and ‘the organ that secretes bile’ are, for instance, intentionally present in the following play upon words: “Is life worth living?” “It depends upon the liver.” Сf.: “What do you do with the fruit?” “We eat what we can, and what we can’t eat we can.”

Very seldom can ambiguity of this kind interfere with understanding. The following example is unambiguous, although the words back and part have several homonyms, and maid and heart are polysemantic:

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh give me back my heart (Byron).

Homonymy exists in many languages, but in English it is particularly frequent, especially among monosyllabic words. In the list of 2540 homonyms given in the “Oxford English Dictionary”  89% are monosyllabic words and only 9.1 % are words of two syllables. From the viewpoint of their morphological structure, they are mostly one-morpheme words.

 

2. Classification of homonyms and their sources.

The most widely accepted classification is that recognising homonyms proper, homophones and homographs. Homonyms proper are words identical in pronunciation and spelling, like fast and liver above. Other examples are: back n ‘part of the body’ : : back adv ‘away from the front’ : : back v ‘go back’; ball n ‘a round object used in games’ : : ball n ‘a gathering of people for dancing’; bark n ‘the noise made by a dog’ : : bark v ‘to utter sharp explosive cries’ : : bark n ‘the skin of a tree’ : : bark n ‘a sailing ship’; base n ‘bottom’ : : base v ‘build or place upon’ : : base a ‘mean’; bay n ‘part of the sea or lake filling wide-mouth opening of land’ : : bay n ‘recess in a house or a room’ : : bay v ‘bark’ : : bay n ‘the European laurel’. The important point is that homonyms are distinct words: not different meanings within one word.

Homophones are words of the same sound but of different spelling and meaning: air : : heir; arms : : alms; buy : : by; him : : hymn; knight : : night; not: : knot; or: : oar; piece : : peace; rain: : reign; scent: : cent; steel : : steal; storey : : story; write : : right and many others.

In the sentence The play-wright on my right thinks it right that some conventional rite should symbolise the right of every man to write as he pleases the sound complex [rait] is a noun, an adjective, an adverb and a verb, has four different spellings and six different meanings. The difference may be confined to the use of a capital letter as in bill and Bill, in the following example: “How much is my milk bill?” “Excuse me, Madam, but my na me is John.”

On the other hand, whole sentences may be homophonic: The sons raise meat : : The sun’s rays meet. To understand these one needs a wider context. If you hear the second in the course of a lecture in optics, you will understand it without thinking of the possibility of the first.

Homographs аrе words different in sound and in meaning but accidentally identical in spelling: bow [bou] : : bow [bau]; lead [li:d] : : lead [led]; row [rou] : : row [rau]; sewer [’souэ] : : sewer [sjuэ]; tear [tiэ] : : tear [tea]; wind [wind] : : wind [waind] and many more.

It has been often argued that homographs constitute a phenomenon that should be kept apart from homonymy as the object of linguistics is sound language. This viewpoint can hardly be accepted. Because of the effects of education and culture written English is a generalised national form of expression. An average speaker does not separate the written and oral form. On the contrary he is more likely to analyse the words in terms of letters than in terms of phonemes with which he is less familiar. That is why a linguist must take into consideration both the spelling and the pronunciation of words when analysing cases of identity of form and diversity of content.

Various types of classification for homonyms proper have been suggested.

A comprehensive system may be worked out if we are guided by the theory of oppositions and in classifying the homonyms take into consideration the difference or sameness in their lexical and grammatical meaning, paradigm and basic form. For the sake of completeness we shall consider this problem in terms of the same mapping technique used for the elements of vocabulary system connected with the word sound.

As both form and meaning can be further subdivided, the combination of distinctive features by which two words are compared becomes more complicated — there are four features: the form may be phonetical and graphical, the meaning — lexical and grammatical, a word may also have a paradigm of grammatical forms different from the basic form.

The distinctive features shown in the table below are lexical meaning (different denoted by A, or nearly the same denoted by A), grammatical meaning (different denoted by B, or same by B), paradigm (different denoted by C, or same denoted by C), and basic form (different D and same D).

The term “nearly same lexical meaning” must not be taken too literally. It means only that the corresponding members of the opposition have some important invariant semantic components in common. “Same grammatical meaning” implies that both members belong to the same part of speech.

Same paradigm comprises also cases when there is only one word form, i.e. when the words are unchangeable. Inconsistent combinations of features are crossed out in the table. It is, for instance, impossible for two words to be identical in all word forms and different in basic forms, or for two homonyms to show no difference either in lexical or grammatical meaning, because in this case they are not homonyms. That leaves twelve possible classes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homonyms

Difference and Identity in Words
A Different lexical meaning			A Nearly same lexical meaning
В Different grammatical meaning	Partial Homonymy		Patterned Homonymy		D Same basic form
		light, -s n light, -er, -est a flat, -s n flat, -er, -est a	for prp for cj	before prp before adv before cj		eye, -s n eye, -s, -ed, -ing v
		might n may—might v			thought n thought v (Past Indefinite Tense of think)	D Different basic form
В Same grammatical meaning	axis, axes n axe — axes n bat—butted v butt—butted v			Synonyms
		lie—lay—lain V lie — lied — lied v	Full Homonymy spring, -s n spring, -s n spring, -s n	Polysemy Variants of the same polysemantic word		D Same basic form
	С Different paradigm	С Same paradigm or no changes		С Different paradigm

 

The 12 classes are:

ABCD. Members of the opposition light n ‘the contrary of darkness’ : : light a ‘not heavy’ are different in lexical and grammatical meaning, have different paradigms but the same basic form. The class of partial homonymy is very numerous. A further subdivision might take into consideration the parts of speech to which the members belong, namely the oppositions of noun : : verb, adjective : : verb, n : : adjective, etc.

ABCD. Same as above, only not both members are in their basic form. The noun (here might ‘power’) is in its basic form, the singular, but the verb may will coincide with it only in the Past Tense. This lack of coincidence between basic forms is not frequent, so only few examples are possible. Compare also bit n ‘a small piece’ and bit (the Past Indefinite Tense and Participle II of bite).

ABCD. Contains pairs of words belonging to the same part of speech, different in their basic form but coinciding in some oblique form, e. g. in the plural, or in the case of verbs, in the Past Tense. Axe — axes, axis — axes. The type is rare.

ABCD. Different lexical meaning, same basic form, same grammatical meaning and different paradigm: lie — lay — lain and lie — lied — lied. Not many cases belong to this group.

ABCD. Represents pairs different in lexical and grammatical meaning but not in paradigm, as these are not changeable form words. Examples: for prp contrasted to for cj.

ABCD. The most typical case of full homonymy accepted by everybody and exemplified in every textbook. Different lexical meanings, but the homonyms belong to the same part of speech: spring₁ n ‘a leap’ :: spring₂ ‘a source’ :: spring₃ n ‘the season in which vegetation begins’.

ABCD. Patterned homonymy. Differs from the previous (i.e. ABCD) in the presence of some common component in the lexical meaning of the members, some lexical invariant: before prp, before adv, before cj, all express some priority in succession. This type of opposition is regular among form words. .

ABCD. Pairs showing maximum identity. But as their lexical meaning is only approximately the same, they may be identified as variants of one polysemantic word.

ABCD. Contains all the cases due to conversion: eye n : : eye v. The members differ in grammatical meaning and paradigm. This group is typical of patterned homonymy. Examples of such noun-to-verb or verb-to-noun homonymy can be augmented almost indefinitely. The mean-ing of the second element can always be guessed if the first is known.

ABCD. Pairs belonging to different parts of speech and coinciding in some of the forms. Their similarity is due to a common root, as in thought n : thought v (the Past Indefinite Tense of think).

ABCD. Similarity in both lexical and grammatical meaning combined with difference in form is characteristic of synonyms and hyponyms.

ABCD. The group is not numerous and comprises chiefly cases of double plural with a slight change in meaning such as brother — brothers : : brother — brethren.

It goes without saying that this is a model that gives a general scheme. Actually a group of homonyms may contain members belonging to different groups in this classification. Take, for example, fell₁ n ‘animal’s hide or skin with the hair’; fell₂ n ‘hill’ and also ‘a stretch of North-English moorland’; fell₃ a ‘fierce’ (poet.); fell₄ v ‘to cut down trees’ and as a noun ‘amount of timber cut’; fell₅ (the Past Indefinite Tense of the verb fall). This group may be broken into pairs, each of which will fit into one of the above described divisions. Thus, fell₁ : : fell₂ may be characterised as ABCD, fell₁ : : fell₄ as ABCD and fell₄ : : fell₅ as ABCD.

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.

The abundance 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 sound development, when two or three words of different origin accidentally coincide in sound; and
2. homonymy developed from polysemy through divergent sense development. Both may be combined with loss of endings and other morphological processes.

In Old English the words zesund ‘healthy’ and sund ‘swimming’ were separate words both in form and in meaning. In the course of time they have changed their meaning and phonetic form, and the latter accidentally coincided: OE sund>ModE sound ‘strait’; OE зesund>ModE sound ‘healthy’. The group was joined also accidentally by the noun sound ‘what is or may be heard’ with the corresponding verb that developed from French and ultimately from the Latin word sonus, and the verb sound ‘to measure the depth’ of dubious etymology. The coincidence is purely accidental.

Two different Latin verbs: cadere ‘to fall’ and capere ‘to hold’ are the respective sources of the homonyms case₁ ‘instance of thing’s occurring’ and case₂ ‘a box’. Indeed, case₁<OFr cas < Lat casus ‘fall’, and case₂<Old Northern French casse<Lat capsa. Homonymy of this type is universally recognised. The other type is open to discussion. V.I. Abayev accepts as homonymy only instances of etymologically different words. Everything else in his opinion is polysemy. Many other scholars do not agree with V.I. Abayev and insist on the semantic and structural criteria for distinguishing homonymy from polysemy.

Unlike the homonyms case and sound all the homonyms of the box group due to disintegration or split of polysemy are etymologically connected. The sameness of form is not accidental but based on genetic relationship. They are all derived from one another and are all ultimately traced to the Latin buxus. “The Concise Oxford Dictionary” has five entries for box: box₁ n ‘a kind of small evergreen shrub’; box₂ n ‘receptacle made of wood, cardboard, metal, etc. and usually provided with a lid’; box₃ v ‘to put into a box’; box₄ n ‘slap with the hand on the ear’; box₅ v — a sport term meaning ‘to fight with fists in padded gloves’.

Such homonyms may be partly derived from one another but their common point of origin lies beyond the limits of the English language. In these words with the appearance of a new meaning, very different from the previous one, the semantic structure of the parent word splits. The new meaning receives a separate existence and starts a new semantic structure of its own. Hence the term disintegration or split of polysemy.

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. Whereas in the examples dealing with phonetic convergence, i.e. when we said that case₁ and case₂ are different words because they differ in origin, we had definite linguistic criteria to go by; in the case of disintegration of polysemy there are none to guide us, we can only rely on intuition and individual linguistic experience. For a trained linguist the number of unrelated homonyms will be much smaller than for an uneducated person. The knowledge of etymology and cognate languages will always help to supply the missing links. It is easier, for instance, to see the connection between beam ‘a ray of light’ and beam ‘the metallic structural part of a building’ if one knows the original meaning of the word, i.e. ‘tree’ (OE beam||Germ Baum), and is used to observe similar metaphoric transfers in other words. The connection is also more obvious if one is able to notice the same element in such compound names of trees as hornbeam, whitebeam, etc.

The conclusion, therefore, is that in diachronic treatment the only rigorous criterion is that of etymology observed in explanatory dictionaries of the English language where words are separated according to their origin, as in match₁ ‘a piece of inflammable material you strike fire with’ (from OFr mesche, Fr mèche) and match₂ (from OE gemæcca ‘fellow’).

It is interesting to note that out of 2540 homonyms listed in “The Oxford English Dictionary” only 7% are due to disintegration of polysemy, all the others are etymologically different. One must, however, keep in mind that patterned homonymy is here practically disregarded.