Polysemy vs. homonymy

The major problem arising from this topic is to make distinction between polysemy and homonymy. While both polysemy and homonymy give rise to lexical ambiguity (two or more meanings associated with a word), the nature of the ambiguity is different in each case. Polysemy is the phenomenon whereby a lexical item is commonly associated with two or more meanings that appear to be related in some way. Consider the following examples containing the English preposition over.

a. The portrait is over the mantelpiece (above).

b. The cat jumped over the wall (on the other side).

c. The car drove over the bridge (across).

The word over is associated with a slightly different meaning or sense (indicated in the brackets), but these senses are nevertheless relatively closely related. This shows that over in these sentences presents polysemy.

Polysemy contrasts with homonymy, which relates to two distinct words that happen to share the same form in sound (homophones) and/or in writing (homographs). For example, the form bank relates to two different words with unrelated meanings, ‘financial institution’ and ‘bank of a river’. These two senses are not only synchronically unrelated (unrelated in current usage) but also historically unrelated. The word bank meaning ‘side of river’ has been in the English language for much longer, and is related to the Old Icelandic word for ‘hill’, while the word bank meaning ‘financial institution’ was borrowed from Italian banca, meaning ‘money changer’s table’ (Collins English Dictionary).

These are different meanings, realized by the same word form. In this case, we talk about homonymy, which occurs when two or more words happen to have the same form.

It is important to admit that there is no clear cut dividing line between these notions. Any semantic theory holds that polysemy can be assumed if a word behaves as a single linguistic sign, i.e. its syntactic, morphological and semantic properties remain constant if it is used in different meanings. For example, one indication that two instances of words belong to different lexemes is if they are spelled differently. One more factor in favor of polysemy is that a word should only have one set of morphological properties. Some scholars suggest a different method that mostly leads to the same result as this latter one – it is to check if two meanings of a word belong to the same semantic field. If not, they are homonyms. Further semantic tests include checking if the word has the same set of synonyms and antonyms when used in different meanings. Distribution tests that are related to pronominalization and zeugma, mentioned above, are used today to shed light on the problem.

Zgusta, L.(1988). Pragmatics, lexicography and dictionaries of English. World Englishes, 7 (3), 243-253.

TASK 5.

Supply homonyms for the words below and explain their meanings:

Altar, air, birth, cannon, capital, sent, die, do (first note of diatonic scale), due, elicit, fishing, forward, fowl, gate, guilt, gorilla, grown, guest, hall, heroin, Hugh, idol, insight, lesson, marshal, metal, mood, mustard, need, nun, oral, pair, peel, peer, plate, pole, pride, queue, rain, raise, read, reek, road, surf, serial, so, sink, stationary, swayed, teas, tighten, wave, where, yoke.