Homonyms: Words of the Same Form

Homonyms are words which are identical in sound and spelling, or, at least, in one of these aspects, but different in their meaning. E. g. J bank, n. — a shore bank, n. — an institution for receiving, lending, ex-changing, and safeguarding money ball, n. — a sphere; any spherical body ball, n. — a large dancing party English vocabulary is rich in such pairs and even groups of words. Their identical forms are mostly accidental: the majority of homonyms coincided due to phonetic changes which they suffered during their development. If synonyms and antonyms can be regarded as the treasury of the language's expressive resources, homonyms are of no interest in this respect, and one cannot expect them to be of particular value for communication.

Sources of Homonyms

One source of homonyms has already been mentioned: phonetic changes which words undergo in the course of their historical devel-opment. As a result of such changes, two or more words which were formerly pronounced differently may develop identical sound forms and thus become homonyms. Night and knight, for instance, were not homonyms in Old English as the initial k in the second word was pronounced, and not dropped as it is in its modern sound form: О.Е. kniht (cf. О.Е. niht). Borrowing is another source of homonyms. A borrowed word may, in the final stage of its phonetic adaptation, duplicate in form either a native word or another borrowing. So, in the group of homo-nyms rite, n. — to write, v. — right, adj. the second and third words are of native origin whereas rite is a Latin borrowing (< Lat. ritus). In the pair piece, n. — peace, п., the first originates from O.F. pais, and the second from O.F. (< Gaulish) pettia. Bank, n. ("shore") is a native word, and bank, n. ("a financial institution") is an Italian borrowing.

Shortening is a further type of word-building which increases the number of homonyms. E.g. fan, n. in the sense of "an enthusiastic admirer of some kind of sport or of an actor, singer, etc." is a shorten-ing produced from fanatic. Its homonym is a Latin borrowing fan, n. which denotes an implement for waving lightly to produce a cool current of air. The noun rep, n. denoting a kind of fabric (cf. with the R. репс) has three homonyms made by shortening: rep, n. (< reper-tory), rep, n. (< representative), rep, n. (< reputation)', all the three are informal words.

Classification of Homonyms

The subdivision of homonyms into homonyms proper, homophones and homographs is certainly not precise enough and does not reflect certain important features of these words, and, most important of all, their status as parts of speech. The examples given in the be-ginning of this chapter show that homonyms may belong both to the same and to different categories of parts of speech. Obviously, a clas-sification of homonyms should reflect this distinctive feature. Also, the paradigm of each word should be considered, because it has been observed that the paradigms of some homonyms coincide completely, and of others only partially. Accordingly, Professor A. I. Smirnitsky classified homonyms into two large classes: I. full homonyms, II. partial homonyms.

Full lexical homonyms are words which represent the same category of parts of speech and have the same paradigm. E. g. / match, n. — a game, a contest

I match, n. — a short piece of wood used for

I producing fire

wren, n. — a member of the Women's Royal Naval

Service wren, n. — a bird

Partial homonyms are subdivided into three subgroups:

A. Simple lexico-grammatical partial homonyms are words which belong to the same category of parts of speech. Their paradigms have one identical form, but it is never the same form, as will be seen from the examples.

E. g. / (to) found, v.

\ found, v. (Past Indef., Past Part. of to ( find)

/ to lay, v.

I lay, v. (Past Indef. of to lie)

[ to bound, v.

I bound, v. (Past Indef., Past Part, of to

( bind)