Lecture 5 Homonymy

Homonyms are traditionally defined as two or more words identical in their sound or written form and different in meaning.

The practical values of studying homonymy:

1. It is necessary to meet the needs of school education

2. To solve the problems of automatic translation

3. It is very important for lexicography, i.e. compiling dictionaries.

Classification of homonyms

Some words are homonymous in all their forms: we observe full homonymy of the paradigm of two or more different words:

b ail 1. залог – bail (singular), bails (plural)

2. барьер между лошадями – bail (singular), bails (plural) bail, bails

4. ручка (ведра) – bail (singular), bails (plural)

In other cases the whole of the paradigm is not identical, only some forms are homonymous:

bail 1. залог – bail, bail’s (поручитель), bails (the plural form)

3. вычерпывать воду – bail, bails (the 3^d person singular), bailed, bailing

This is partial homonymy.

The bulk of full homonyms are to be found within the same parts of speech; partial homonymy, as a rule, observed in word-forms belonging to different parts of speech. According to the type of meaning homonyms may be classified into: lexical, lexico-grammatical, and grammatical. Let’s take two homonyms: bow¹ (поклон) and bow² (лук) – bow, bows. As we see their paradigms coincide and they differ only in their lexical meaning. Such homonyms are called lexical homonyms. If we compare cow¹ n. (корова) – cow, cows and cow² v. (запугивать) – cow, cows, cowed, cowing, we see that they differ not only in their lexical, but also grammatical meanings as well (one is a verb, while the other a noun). Such homonyms are called lexico-grammatical.

Modern English has many homonymic word-forms differing only in their grammatical meaning. This the form of the past tense of most English verbs is homonymous with the form of participle 2, e.g. asked – asked; the possessive case and the common case of English nouns are also homonymous: sister’s sg. and sisters pl. Such homonyms are called grammatical homonyms.

Traditionally homonyms are classified into:

1. Homophones – words identical in their sound-forms but different in their spelling and meaning, e.g. bear – bare.

2. Homographs – words identical in their spelling but different in their sound form and meaning e.g. tear and tear.

3. Perfect homonyms – words identical in their spelling and sound form and different in their meaning, e.g. mass (месса) and mass (масса).

The drawback of the first group of homonyms:

It does not take into consideration the grammatical meanings of the words, e.g. bear, n., v – bare, adj.

The second drawback of the traditional classification is that is does not take into consideration the fact that one group is a group of full homonyms, while the others are partial homonyms.

tear¹ – tears, tore, torn, tearing mass¹ – masses

tear² – tears mass² – masses

The third drawback of the scheme is that it does not draw the line between words and word-forms:

find-finds-found - found-founded-founded

Lecture 6 Antonyms

Usually antonyms are defined as words different in sound form and opposite in meaning. There is another definition given by Arnold: “antonyms may be classified as two rarely more words of the same language belonging to the same part of speech identical in style and nearly identical in distribution (сочетание с другими словами), associated and used together so that their denotative meanings render contrary or contradictory notions”.

There are three groups of antonyms:

1. Contradictories – which represent the type of semantic relations that exist between pairs like: dead – alive, single – married. To use one of terms is to contradict the other and to use not before one of them is to make them semantically equivalent to the other, e.g. dead – not alive. Among contradictories we find a subgroup of words of the type: young – old, big – small the difference between this and the pair described above is that to say not young does not necessarily meant to say old. In fact these terms do not represent absolute values, to use one of the terms is to imply comparison with some norm, e.g. she is young, but she is older than her sister. To be older does not mean to be old.

2. Contraries – differ from contradictories mainly because the latter admit of no possibility between them: one is single or married, dead or alive, whereas contraries admit such possibilities. That may be observed in cold – hot and cold – warm. Thus we may regard as antonyms not only cold and hot but also cold and warm. Contraries may be opposed to each other by the absence or presence of one of the components of meaning like sex or age, e.g. man – woman, man – boy.

3. Incompatibles (несовместимости) – semantic relations of incompatibility exist among the antonyms with the common component and may be described as the reverse of hyponymy, that is the relations of exclusion. E.g. to say morning is to say not evening, not afternoon, not night. The negation of one member of this set doesn’t imply semantic equivalent with the other but exclude the possibility of the other words of this set. A relation of incompatibility may be observed between color terms as the color of red excludes that of black, blue, yellow.

Antonyms may be classified into proper and derivational. The chief characteristic of the former is that they are gradable. Grading is based on the operation of comparison, e.g. love – hate, liking – antipathy, attachment – indifference. Whenever a sentence contains an antonym or an antonymic pair it implicitly or explicitly contains comparison. The denial of the one member of the antonymic pair does not always imply the assertion of the other.

Derivational – the affixes are used to deny the quality stated in the stem, e.g. appear – disappear. There are typical affixes that are used in forming derivational antonyms, e.g. un-, dis-, ir-, etc. Several features distinguish the two groups of antonyms. In words containing the above-mentioned prefixes the contrast is express morphologically therefore if the morphological motivation is clear there is no necessity in contrast, e.g. to disappoint is not the antonym of appoint.