23) Broadening and narrowing of meaning

1) Broadening of meaning. Sometimes the process of transference may result in a considerable change in range of meaning. The French borrowing ‘to arrive’ began its line in English in a narrow meaning ‘to come to shore, to land’. In modern English it has greatly widened its combinability and developed the general meaning ‘to come’ (to arrive in a city, country, to arrive at a hotel, college, place). The meaning developed through transference based on contiguity, but the range of the second meaning is much broader.

It’s interesting to trace the history of the word ‘girl’ as an example of the changes in the range of meaning in the course of the semantic development of a word. In middle English it had the meaning of a small child of either sex. Then the word underwent the process of transference and developed the meaning of ‘a small child of the female sex’. So the range of meaning was narrowed. In its further semantic development the word gradually broadened its range of meaning, at first it came to denote not only a female child, but also a young unmarried woman, later, any young woman and in modern colloquial English it’s practically synonyms to the noun ‘woman’, so its range of meaning is quite broad. 2) Narrowing of meaning. In modern English we come across many examples of narrowing of meaning. For example – The word ‘deer’ meant any beast, but now it means a certain kind of beasts. The word ‘meat’ meant any food, but now it means a certain food product. The word ‘lady’ meant mistress of the house, a married woman, now it means ‘wife or daughter of baronet’. In these words the second meaning developed due to the process of transference based on contiguity. ‘Lord’ and ‘lady’ are examples of narrowing of meaning if we compare the range of original and of the resultant.

24) The traditional classification of homonyms

Homonyms are words which are identical in sound and spelling or at least in one of these aspects, but different in their meaning. For example – bank (as a shore), and bank (as an institution for safeguard money). The identical forms of homonyms are mostly accidental. The majority of homonyms coincided due to phonetic changes which they suffered during their development. Synonyms and antonyms enrich the vocabulary, homonyms don’t. Groups of synonyms and pairs of antonyms are created by the vocabulary system with a special purpose whereas homonyms are accidental creations and therefore purposeless and sometimes lead to confusion and misunderstanding. But at the same time they are one of the most important sources of humour. The pun is a joke, based upon the play of words of similar form, but different meaning. The word board have several meaning (доска and комиссия). In fact the humorous effect is caused by the interplay of 2 meanings of the word ‘board’.

The traditional classification of homonyms subdivide them into homonyms proper, homophones and homographs.

1) Homonyms proper are words the same in sound and spelling. For example, board.

2) Homophones are the words which have the same pronunciation but a different spelling and a different meaning. Native speakers of a language rarely confuse which word is being used. Even though the sound is the same, because they use context to help them predict the word they are about to hear. The existence of homophones can give rise to place on words or puns. Here are some examples – sail and sale, war and wore, whether and weather, hire and higher., wear and where.

3) The third type of homonyms is called homographs. These are words which are the same in spelling but different in sound. Here are some examples – ‘to bow’ means ‘to incline the head or body in salutations’, ‘bow’ (as a noun) – which means ‘a flexible strip of wood for propelling arrows’. Another example is ‘to lead’ (which means go before to show the way) and lead (as a noun) which means a heavy rather soft metal.