7. Homonyms. Paronyms

Homonyms (from Greek homos – “the same” and onoma – “name”) are the words, different in meaning and either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in spelling or sound, for example ball as a round object used in game, and ball as a gathering of people for dancing.

The most widely accepted classification of them is as following:

1. homonyms proper (or perfect homonyms);

2. homophones;

3. homographs.

Proper homonyms (perfect homonyms) are words identical both in spelling and in sound-form but different in meaning, for example, case – ‘something that has happened’ and case – ‘a box, a container’.

Homophones are words identical in sound-form but different both in spelling and in meaning: scent, cent – sent, son – sun, father – farther, discreet (благоразумный) – discrete (дискретный), for – fore (нос корабля).

Homographs are words identical in spelling but different both in their sound-form and meaning: tear [tiә] – ‘a drop of water that comes from the eyes’, tear [tεә] – ‘to pull apart by force’; row [rευ] – ‘an arrangement of persons or things in a line’, row [rаυ] – ‘a noisy quarrel or dispute’.

The traditional classification is far from being a perfect one as it doesn’t take into consideration the part of speech words belong to Professor A.I. Smirnitsky classified homonyms into two large classes with respect to part of speech status of words: 1) full homonyms; 2) partial homonyms.

I. Full homonyms – words which represent the same part of speech category and have the same paradigm, e.g. match – ‘a game, a contest’ and ‘a short piece of wood used for producing fire’; pit ‘a large, usually deep opening in the ground’ and chiefly US and Canadian ‘the stone of a cherry, plum, etc’, key ‘a metal instrument to fit a lock’ and ‘a small low island or bank composed of sand and coral fragments’. The difference is confined to the lexical meaning only.

II. Partial homonyms – words which coincide in some of their forms, but have different paradigms. There are three groups of them.

1. Partial lexical homonyms are words which belong to the same part of speech, are identical in form but differ in lexical meaning and paradigms. E.g. to lie (lay, lain) : : to lie (lied, lied); to hang (hung, hung) : : to hang (hanged, hanged).

Lexico-grammatical homonyms are words which belong to different parts of speech and differ in lexical meaning and grammatical meanings.

А. Simple lexico-grammatical homonyms are words which belong to one and the same part of speech and differ in lexical meaning and grammatical paradigm, e.g. to found : : found (past indefinite, past participle of “to find”); to lay : : lay (past indefinite of “to lie”), etc.

B. Complex lexico-grammatical homonyms are words which belong different parts of speech and differ in lexical meaning and grammatical paradigm, e.g., rose (n) : : rose (past indefinite of “to rise”); left (adj) : : left (past indefinite of “to leave”), bit (n) : : bit (past indefinite of “to bite”).

Grammatical homonyms are homonymous word-forms of one and the same word which are different in grammatical meaning only: asked (Past Indefinite) – asked (Past Participle), learned (v) – learned (adj.) ['lɜ:nɪd]; brother’s (Possesive Case) – brothers’ (Possesive Case) – brothers (Plural), going (Participle I) – going (Gerund) – going (Noun).

The English vocabulary is rich in such pairs and even groups of words.

If synonyms and antonyms can be regarded as the treasury of the language’s expressive resources and they are created by the vocabulary system with a particular purpose, homonyms are accidental creations and therefore purposeless.

Sources of homonyms are as follows.

1) Homonymy can be caused by phonetic changes (convergent sound development) which words undergo in the course of their historical development. As a result of such changes, two or more words which were formerly pronounced differently may develop identical sound forms and thus become homonyms. For example night and knight 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: OE kniht.

2) Borrowing is another source of homonyms. A borrowed word in its last stage of adaptation can become identical in pronunciation or spelling to a native one or another borrowing, e.g. race (a group of people of common ancestry – French) : : race (a contest of speed – Scandinavian); match (a game, a contest of skill, strength – native) : : match (a slender short piece of wood used for producing fire – French).

3) Word-building also can be one of sources of homonyms, e.g. liner I. ‘a large luxurious passenger ship’ is homonimous with liner II. ‘a plastic bag used for lining a rubbish bin’ though having different derivational history – liner I is derived from the noun line while liner II has a verbal derivational base to line. The most important type in this respect is conversion (the formation of a lexico-grammatical homonym by shifting a word from one part of speech to another), for instance, pale (adj) – to pale (v), to make (v) – make (n), ice (n) – to ice (v), pride (n) – to pride (v).

Shortening is a further type of word-building which increases the number of homonyms, e.g. fan (n) – as ‘an enthusiastic admirer of some kind of sport or of an actor, singer, etc.’ is a shortening produced from fanatic. Its homonym is a Latin borrowing fan which denotes ‘an implement for waving lightly to produce a cool current of air.’

4) A further course of homonyms is called split polysemy (divergent meaning development). Two or more homonyms can originate from different meanings of the same word when for some reason, the semantic structure of the word breaks into several parts. For example, flower and flour originally were one word which had the meanings ‘the flower’, ‘the finest part of wheat’.

This process also takes place in those cases when one of the intermediate meanings of a polysemantic word falls out, and the remaining meanings lose connections with each other and start separate existence, that is become homonyms. The classic example is board. It had four meanings: 1) ‘a long, thin piece of timber’; 2) ‘table’; 3) ‘daily meals provided for pay’; 4) ‘an official group of persons who direct and supervise some activity’. When the word table was borrowed from French, it ousted the second meaning of the word board from common speech. So the word board lost a link between its other meanings and they became three separate homonymous words.

Homonyms differ in their word-formation activity, e.g. affect₁ “have an effect on; make a difference to” has eight derivatives (affect, affective, affected, affectedly, affectedness, affectation, affection, affectational, affectionally) whereas, affect₂ “pretend to have or feel (something)” has three derivatives (affect, affection, affecting, affected).

Paronyms are words very identical in sound form and spelling but having some differences in them and different meanings, e.g. loose – lose; farther – further; model – modal; quite – quiet; Polish – polish; decent (respectable, suitable) – descend (downward motion); to contend (бороться) – content (довольный, удовлетворенный); historic – historical (имеющий историческое значение a historic speech – связанный с историей a historical novel); classic – classical (классический, образцовый classic example, classic suit – классический, традиционный classical music, classical art).

Translator’s false friends – interlanguage paronyms, pseudo-international words, e.g. accord – аккорд, apartment – апартаменты, herb – герб, scallop – эскалоп, lunatic – лунатик, Hispanic – испанский, pretence – претензия.

Paronomasia is a stylistic device based on the contextual use of paronyms. For example:

It is not my principle to pay the interest, it’s not my interest to pay the principal.

Your children need your presence more than your presents (Jesse Jackson).