The word is the essential structural-semantic unit of a language, naming the objects and their characteristics, relations, having total combination of semantic, phonetic and grammatical indications specific to given language.
Polysemy is inherent in either words or morphemes (root or affixal), also in constructive objects (word-combinations, sentences, texts). Polysemy characterizes overwhelming majority of words (either nominal or link words), which we can easily be convinced in if open explanatory dictionary of any language.
But we should differentiate polysemy from homonymy. Homonymous units have coinciding components (either sound or graphical, or both). There is no connection between homonymous words, which could affirm about the relation of semantic motivation.
Mainly there are two views towards homonymy and polysemy. According to the first view, homonyms are those words that sound equally, which long ago were diffirent in forms and only in the process of historical development coincided with each other in common phonation owing to various phonetic and in general incidental reasons. Other cases, when eqial material and sonic form “wears” different content, are admitted as polysemy.
According to the second view, to homonyms either the words that are historically different are related, but in some cases towards historical reasons concided in phonation, or those cases when various meanings of polysemantic word differ so that its material form “breaks”, giving a life to two or more new words.
The goal of this article is the investigation on the basis of various resources of polysemy and homonymy of some English nouns.
During the procedure of work next aims were set up:
- to analyze the origin of polysemy and homonymy in English;
- to make a review of polysemy and antonymy of English nouns;
- to reveal the problem of a word polysemy and the problem of
During many centuries the traditional object of investigation is a noun, which takes the essential place in the system of parts of speech. It acts as the initial linguistic material, necessary to describe the objects of environment. The noun has the substantial feature and can denote either concrete or abstract objects.
In this case it is pointed on supposition of two varieties – concrete and abstract. The first is tend to physically existing objects of environment, the latter – for the objects, not existing as separate phenomena of environment, but percieved by consciousness in so-called relative form of an object.
The meaning of a word consists of dialectic unity of linguistic and non-linguistic content. Within the description the physical image of a word and display of an object there is a connection. The reconstruction of this connection takes place in the mind automatically: as linguistic sign acts on consciousness there is the display of an object, which is denoted with this sign.
The derivation process of secondary meanings is connected with historical genesis of a language, what is more the signifant role is taken by psycho-physical potentials of a man with the skill to build assocative connections.
Nowadays the condition of lexis is the product of extended historical development, the processes of which were graded in the languages of mental and cognitive potential of the speakers. Polysemy of the word is the direct evidence of that lexis of a language is constantly in dynamic condition, revealing the changes of environmental reality.
There can be such stages of development through which a word penetrates to gain a foothold finally in linguistic environment:
- using;
- consolidating;
From the logical point of view any meaning of a polysemantic word is the primary use of direct meaning of a word, i.e. within the primary and secondary meanings theren is a successive connection. The word starts to be used in a particular meaning within one or some more social groups.
As for homonyms, there are a plenty of words in the modern language, whilst a verb and a noun in Old English became homonyms.
For instance, anger – гнев, разгневаться; name – имя, называть
There are similar examples either with adjectives and verbs: busy – занятый, заняться; free – свободный, освободить; dry – сухой, сохнуть; own – собственный, владеть
Polysemy is based on coherence of word meaning: all its meanings are based on common meaning. However not all word meanings are saved in equal level and influence on its usage and word forming connections. It leads to that polysemantic word breaks down to series of words, which have in common only sound form.
Natural functioning of a language permanently causes to the shifts of this simple correlation «one to one», and generates another correlation «one to more, than to one».
For instance, let’s take the word «oil». The several meanings can be pointed in a dictionary:
- растительное масло
- нефть
- масляные краски
A set of meanings of the same word are called semantic structure of a word in the works of V.V. Vinogradov and his followers. Separate components of semantic structure of words A.I. Smirnitcki named as lexicosemantical variants.
Polysemy is certainly not an anomaly. Most English words are polysemantic. It should be noted that the wealth of expressive resources of a language largely depends on the degree to which polysemy has developed in the language. Sometimes people who are not very well informed in linguistic matters claim that a language is lacking in words if the need arises for the same word to be applied to several different phenomena. In actual fact, it is exactly the opposite: if each word is found to be capable of conveying at least two concepts instead of one, the expressive potential of the whole vocabulary increases twofold. Hence, a well-developed polysemy is a great advantage in a language.
On the other hand, it should be pointed out that the number of sound combinations that human speech organs can produce is limited. Therefore at a certain stage of language development the production of new words by morphological means is limited as well, and polysemy becomes increasingly important for enriching the vocabulary. From this, it should be clear that the process of enriching the vocabulary does not consist merely in adding new words to it, but, also, in the constant development of polysemy.
The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops gradually, mostly over the centuries, as more and more new meanings are added to old ones, or oust some of them. So the complicated processes of polysemy development involve both the appearance of new meanings and the loss of old ones. Yet, the general tendency with English vocabulary at the modern stage of its history is to increase the total number of its meanings and in this way to provide for a quantitative and qualitative growth of the language's expressive resources.
When analysing the semantic structure of a polysemantic word, it is necessary to distinguish between two levels of analysis. On the first level, the semantic structure of a word is treated as a system of meanings. For example, the semantic structure of the noun “fire" could be roughly presented by this scheme (only the most frequent meanings are given):
The above scheme suggests that meaning (I) holds a kind of dominance over the other meanings conveying the concept in the most general way whereas meanings (II) (V) are associated with special circumstances, aspects and instances of the same phenomenon.
Meaning (I) (generally referred to as the main meaning) presents the center of the semantic structure of the word holding it together. It is mainly through meaning (I) that meanings (II) (V) (they are called secondary meanings) can be associated with one another, some of them exclusively through meaning (I) the main meaning, as, for instance, meanings (IV) and (V).
From the polysemy of linguistic and speech signs we shoud differentiate homonymy. Within the language vocabulary the words are not isolated, but included into particular systematic group what is more several other ones at once.
Homonymous units have coinciding exponents (either sound or graphical or both). Among semantemes of homonymous words there is no connection, which could attest the relationship of semantic motivation. However, homonymy is inherent to all levels of a language, grammatical homonymy peculiar to the modern English, is not studied well, is possible because of specific theoretical difficulties, equal to those that caused by lexical homonymy. Both kinds of homonymy have series of common features:
- Material (sound) coincidence of units, which have different meanings (grammatical homonyms can have almost all semantic components) – a work (дело) noun and to work (работать) – verb;
- Both kind of homonyms originate in the result of actions of divergence processes (diachronic process, leading to the increase of diversity in language system or according to derivation of new variants of existing units) and convergence (historical process, leading to decrease of diversity in language system on account of vanishing some variant and invariant diffeencies);
- Both kinds of homonymy characterize greater prevalence in a language;
- Homonymous grammatical units coexit alongside with polysemantic
Homonymy is in general determined as coincidence on sounding of words, having different meaning. Besides, homonymy sometimes emerges owing to incidental sound coincidence of words, which were originally different, but during the historical development obtains similar phonetic form.
Lexical homonyms can take more or less significant place in the system of language. In English, language of high degree of homonymy, there are counted 7000 lexical homonyms among widely used words, related to different parts of speech.
Homonymy is connected in modern English language with using of restricted quantity of sounds to form sound cover of suffixes, which is in its turn explained as the number of features of English language historical development (loss and falling of weakstressed vowels, coincidence and falling of some consonants, e.g. nasal [m] and [n] etc.)
As for homonymy of grammatical suffixes it should be strictly distiguished:
- homonymy of forms within the same part of speech;
- homonymy of forms, belonging to the words of dofferent parts of
First type homonymy is observed as in [ho:siz]: this sounding is contemporaneously sounding of either plural form or possession of the word “horse” – “horses” and “horse’s”. Example of second type homonymy can be for instance [drinks], where sounding of a verb “drink” (пить) – (he) drinks (пьет) coincides with the form of noun “drink” (напиток) – “drinks were served” (подали напитки).
Word forming of different parts of speech with the help of homonymous suffixes is widely spread in modern English language.
e.g. sounding of the nouns [(i)z, s] (orthographical (e)s) perform as the sounding of the number of homonymous suffixes :
- suffixes of plural nouns (e)s: horse – horses;
- suffixes of possessive case s: horse – horse’s, children – children’s.
In English zero suffixation is widely spread, which enhances visibility of almost totally absence of morphological means in modern English, and at the same time visibility of «amorphous» feature of the language.
Therefore in different languages we can denote these homonyms, which are absent in other languages. E.g.: ear – ухо, ear – колос.
It should be mentioned that researchers of English language divide homonyms into those, existing only in pronunciation (homophones), existing in written form (homographs), and existing in both pronunciation and written form (homonyms themselves).
Thus, homographs (words with similar graphical component, but different sound exponent): Lead [li:d] вести
Lead [led] свинец
Homophones differ in spelling but are pronounced equally: Write [rait] писать
Right [rait] правый
Rite [rait] ритуал
Thus, homonymy in English language as in other ones could be extremely complicated phenomenon. The phenomenon of polysemy exists not in the speech but in the language.
The problem of polysemy is mainly the problem of interrelation and interdependence of the various meanings of the same word. Polysemy viewed diachronically is a historical change in the semantic structure of the word resulting in new meanings being added to the ones already existing and in the rearrangement of these meanings on its semantic structure.
Polysemy viewed synchronically is understood as coexistence of the various meanings of the same word at a certain historical period and the arrangement of these meanings in the semantic structure of the word.
In the present work there was viewed polysemy, meaning of the word, some “words” about the notion “word”, because it is really very important to know what the word is. It is impossible to speak about the role of the meaning without understanding the “word”, the basic unit of language that unites meaning and form. The context was observed. Attention should be paid to it.
There is a sentence, it must be translated, for example from English to Russian, theoretically if that who translates is not a professional translator it is not necessary to know the types of context, and in general and to professional translator too. During the whole studying a student is taught by teachers to understand the sentence and then to translate it with the context help. He chooses the necessary meaning intuitively. But the observing context types explain a lot, for example the choice of the necessary meaning. Sometimes you don’t know all the meanings of translated word, and…you guess by context. Context is the minimal stretch of speech necessary to find out individual meanings. Linguistic contexts comprise lexical and grammatical contexts and are contrasted to extra-linguistic contexts. In extra-linguistic contexts the meaning of the experiment is determined not only by linguistic factor but also by the actual situation in which the word is used.
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