Homonyms in English and their specific features — страница 3

  • Просмотров 11575
  • Скачиваний 80
  • Размер файла 66
    Кб

homonymous words and word-forms. It is held that languages where short words abound have more homonyms than those where longer words are prevalent. Therefore it is sometimes suggested that abundance of homonyms in Modern English is to be accounted for by the monosyllabic structure of the commonly used English words. Not only words but other linguistic units may be homonymous. Here, however, we are concerned with the homonymy of words and word-forms only, so we shall not touch upon the problem of homonymous affixes or homonymous phrases When analyzing different cases of homonymy we find that some words are homonymous in all their forms, i.e. we observe full homonymy of the paradigms of two or more different words as, e.g., in seal a sea animal and seal—a design printed on paper

by means of a stamp'. The paradigm "seal, seal's, seals, seals'" is identical for both of them and gives no indication of whether it is seal (1) or seal (2) that we are analyzing. In other cases, e.g. seal—a sea animal' and (to) seal (3)—'to close tightly, we see that although some individual word-forms are homonymous, the whole of the paradigm is not identical. Compare, for instance, the-paradigms: 1. (to)seal-seal-seal's-seals-seals' 2. seal-seals-sealed-sealing, etc. 1 Professor O. Jespersen1) calculated that there are roughly four times as many monosyllabic as polysyllabic homonyms. It is easily observed that only some of the word-forms (e.g. seal, seals, etc.) are homonymous, whereas others (e.g. sealed, sealing) are not. In such cases we cannot speak of

homonymous words but only of homonymy of individual word-forms or of partial homonymy. This is true of a number of other cases, e.g. compare find [faind], found [faund], found [faund] and found [faund], founded ['faundidj, founded [faundid]; know [nou], knows [nouz], knew [nju:], and no [nou]; nose [nouz], noses [nouziz]; new [nju:] in which partial homonymy is observed. From the examples of homonymy discussed above it follows that the bulk of full homonyms are to be found within the same parts of speech (e.g. seal(1) n—seal(2) n), partial homonymy as a rule is observed in word-forms belonging to different parts of speech (e.g. seal n—seal v). This is not to say that partial homonymy is impossible within one part of speech. For instance in the case of the two verbs Me

[lai]—'to be in a horizontal or resting position'—lies [laiz]—lay [lei]—lain [lein] and lie [lai]—'to make an untrue statement'—lies [laiz]—lied [laid]—lied [laid] we also find partial homonymy as only two word-forms [lai], [laiz] are homonymous, all other forms of the two verbs are different. Cases of full homonymy may be found in different parts of speech as, e.g., for [for]—preposition, for [fo:]—conjunction and four [fo:] —numeral, as these parts of speech have no other word-forms. 2.1.2 Classification of homonyms Modern English has a very extensive vocabulary; the number of words according to the dictionary data is no less than 400, 000.A question naturally arises whether this enormous word-stock is composed of separate independent lexical units, or may

it perhaps be regarded as a certain structured system made up of numerous interdependent and interrelated sub-systems or groups of words. This problem may be viewed in terms of the possible ways of classifying vocabulary items. Words can be classified in various ways. Here, however, we are concerned only with the semantic classification of words which gives us a better insight into some aspects of the Modern English word-stock. Attempts to study the inner structure of the vocabulary revealed that in spite of its heterogeneity the English word-stock may be analyzed into numerous sub-systems the members of which have some features in common, thus distinguishing them from the members of other lexical sub-systems. Classification into monosynaptic and polysemantic words is based on

the number of meanings the word possesses. More detailed semantic classifications are generally based on the semantic similarity (or polarity) of words or their component morphemes. Below we give a brief survey of some of these lexical groups of current use both in theoretical investigation and practical class-room teaching. 3.1.2 Diachronically approach of homonyms Now let us analyze the semantic similarity of morphemes. Lexical groups composed of words with semantically and phonemically identical root-morphemes are usually described as word-families or word-clusters. The term itself implies close links between the members of the group. Such are word-families of the type: lead, leader, leadership; dark, darken, darkness; form, formal, formality, and others. It should be noted