homonymy and polysemy
HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY
Semantics is the scientific study of meaning in language and deals with a lot of complex subjects, such as utterances and sentences, reference, sense relation or lexical ambiguity. Semantics often appears in other disciplines, for example in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and communication theory and it is closely connected with pragmatics. As already mentioned the study of meaning is the main point in semantics. It is well known that meaning is an ordinary English word, which like most other words can be used in a number of different ways, but this is rather a very simple view on this matter. Actually, we distinguish two different kinds of meaning, the speaker meaning and the sentence or word meaning. The former expresses what a speaker intends to convey by using a piece of language, the latter what exactly the sentence or a single word means.
However, our task in this seminar paper is rather abstract and a bit more complex, because we are going to explain the dimensions of meaning with special regard on homonymy and polysemy. First of all we are going to describe the characteristics of homonymy and polysemy in detail and thus try to explain how both of them can be distinguished from each other, which involves a precise analysis of the meaning of several words. Afterwards we will analyse the distinction between homophony and homography and finish our paper with a brief conclusion.
BRIEFLY ABOUT HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY
Homonyms are lexemes, like for example bank as ‘a financial institution’ and bank as ‘the edge of a stream’, that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but their meanings are completely unrelated. Lexemes, which are spelt differently, but pronounced in the same way, are called homophones. Two examples for homophony are site and sight or rite and right. Homographs have the same spelling, but their pronunciation is different, for example bow referring to an instrument for shooting arrows and bow indicating a
Semantics is the scientific study of meaning in language and deals with a lot of complex subjects, such as utterances and sentences, reference, sense relation or lexical ambiguity. Semantics often appears in other disciplines, for example in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and communication theory and it is closely connected with pragmatics. As already mentioned the study of meaning is the main point in semantics. It is well known that meaning is an ordinary English word, which like most other words can be used in a number of different ways, but this is rather a very simple view on this matter. Actually, we distinguish two different kinds of meaning, the speaker meaning and the sentence or word meaning. The former expresses what a speaker intends to convey by using a piece of language, the latter what exactly the sentence or a single word means.
However, our task in this seminar paper is rather abstract and a bit more complex, because we are going to explain the dimensions of meaning with special regard on homonymy and polysemy. First of all we are going to describe the characteristics of homonymy and polysemy in detail and thus try to explain how both of them can be distinguished from each other, which involves a precise analysis of the meaning of several words. Afterwards we will analyse the distinction between homophony and homography and finish our paper with a brief conclusion.
BRIEFLY ABOUT HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY
Homonyms are lexemes, like for example bank as ‘a financial institution’ and bank as ‘the edge of a stream’, that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but their meanings are completely unrelated. Lexemes, which are spelt differently, but pronounced in the same way, are called homophones. Two examples for homophony are site and sight or rite and right. Homographs have the same spelling, but their pronunciation is different, for example bow referring to an instrument for shooting arrows and bow indicating a
Bibliography: John Lyons, Semantics 2 (first published 1977) by Cambridge Unversity Press Secondary sources: Charles W. Kreidler, Introducing English Semantics (first published 1998) by Routledge, London Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock, Theoretical and Computational Approaches (first published in 2000), published by Oxford University Press Inc., New York