16. Polysemy and homonymy.

Polysemy – is the ability of words to gain many meanings.

Lexico-semantic variant – the word in one of its meanings.

Samantic paradygme – all lexico-semantic variants of a word taken together.

Not only do different lexemes have different senses; it is also the case that the same lexeme may have a set of senses. This is polysemy and such a lexeme is polysemous. Polysemy is a property of single lexemes, which is characteristic of most lexemes in English. For example, the noun ‘neck’ is treated in standard English dictionaries as a single lexeme with several distinguishable senses: “part of the body”, “part of bottle”, “part of a shirt or other garment”, etc. The lexeme ‘neck’ is thus polysemous.

According to Leech, polysemy (one word having two or more senses) is recognized if the senses concerned are related in two ways: historically and psychologically, which do not necessarily coincide. Two senses are historically related: they are traced back from the same source or one sense is derived from the other; and two senses are psychologically related: they are intuitively felt to be related, and are assumed to be “different uses of the same word” by present-day users of the language. These are the two criteria used to distinguish polysemy from homonymy – the case where two or more words have the same pronunciation and / or spelling. The polisemous lexeme ‘head’ has related senses denoting the head of a person, the head of a company, head of a table, a head of a lettuce, etc whereas the lexeme ‘bank’ with its sense of “a business establishment in which money is kept for saving or commercial purposes or is invested, supplied for loans, or exchanged” is homonymous with the lexeme with the same pronunciation and spelling but unrelated sense of “the slope of land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel”. However, there are cases in which the senses are related historically, but not psychologically and vice versa, which raises the problem for the distinction. An example is the lexeme ‘pupil’ with two different senses of the same origin: “the apparently black circular opening in the center of the iris of the eye, through which light passes to the retina” and “a student under the direct supervision of a teacher or professor”.

Polysemy is the existence of several meanings for a single word or phrase. The word polysemy comes from the Greek words poly-, “many” and sêma, “sign”. In other words it is the capacity for a word, phrase, or sign to have multiple meanings i.e., a large semantic field. Polysemy is a pivotal concept within the humanities, such as media studies and linguistics.

This word calls the process of plurality of meaning. Polysemy exist only in the language, not in speech. In different context we can observe cases of indentical or different meanings.

A word which has more than 1 meaning is called polysemantic.

Polysemy does not intefere with the communicative functions of the language because in every particular case the situation or the context canceals all the meanings of the word but one makes the speech coherent.

In English as in many languages the number of meanings is large than the number of words. That’s why most of words are polysemantic.

Homonymy The word homonym comes from the Greek (homonumos), meaning “having the same name”, which is the conjunction of ὁμός (homos), meaning “common” and ὄνομα (onoma) meaning “name”. In other words, homonymy refers to two or more distinct concepts sharing the “same name”.

Homonyms are words which are identical in sound and spelling, but different in meaning.

Classification of English homonyms:

1) Perfect homonyms or words identical both in pronunciation and in spelling but different in meaning, e. g. bear (ведмідь) —bear (носити, родити); pale (кіл, паля) —pale (блідий, тьмяний)

2) Homographs or heteronyms are words iden¬tical in spelling but different in sound and meaning,

e. g. bow (поклін) — bow (лук), row (ряд) —row (шум, гвалт)

3) Homophones or words identical in sound but dif¬ferent in spelling and meaning,

e. g. son (син) — sun (сонце) pair (пара) — pear (груша)

4) Homoforms are words quite different in meaning but identical in some of their grammatical forms,

e. g. bound — past and past participle from bind—в'язати

bound (to bound) — плигати, скакати

found — past and past participle from find — знаходити

17. Principal ways of word formation.

Word-formation – the process of forming words by combining root and affixal morphemes according to certain patterns specific for the language (affixation, composition), or without any outward means of word formation (conversion, semantic derivation).

2 major groups of word formation:

Words formed as grammatical syntagmas, combinations of full linguistic signs (types: compounding (словосложение), prefixation, suffixation, conversion, and back derivation)

Words, which are not grammatical syntagmas, which are not made up of full linguistic signs. Ex.: expressive symbolism, blending, clipping, rhyme & some others.

Different types of word formation: COMPOUNDING is joining together 2 or more stems.

Types: 1) Without a connecting element: headache, heartbreak; 2) With a vowel or consonant as a linking element: speedometer, craftsman; 3) With a preposition or conjunction as a linking element: down-and-out (в ужасном положении, опустошенный); son-in-law;

PREFIXATION: Prefixes are such particles that can be prefixed to full words. But they are not with independent existence. Native prefixes have developed out of independent words; there is a small number of them: a-; be-; mid-;fore-; mis-. The system of English word formation was entirely upset by the Norman Conquest. From French English borrowed many words with suffixes & prefixes. A lot of borrowed prefixes in English: Auto-; Demi-; Mono-; Multi-; Semi-; Post-.

SUFFIXATION: A suffix is a derivative final element, which is or was productive in forming new words. 2 groups: 1) A foreign word is combined with a native affix: full, less, ness: clearness, faithless, faithful. 2) Foreign affixes are added to native words: ance, al, ity, able. Semi suffixes are elements, which stand midway between full words & suffixes like, worthy, way, wise, a Godlike creature, trustworthy, clockwise, midway.

CONVERSION (zero derivation) A certain stem is used for the formation of a categorically different word without a derivative element being added: Bag – to bag; Back – to back; Bottle – to bottle.

CLIPPING: Consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts: Mathematics – maths, Laboratory – lab, Captain – cap, Gymnastics – gym

3 types: 1) The first part is left (the commonest type): advertisement – ad; 2) The second part is left: telephone – phone; airplane – plane; 3) A middle part is left: influenza – flu; refrigerator – fridge.

BLENDING is part of two words to form one word (merging into one word): Smoke + fog = smog; Breakfast + lunch = brunch; Smoke + haze = smaze (дымка)

WORD MANUFACTURING A word or word combination that appears or especially coined by some author: Sentence – sentenceness; “I am English & my Englishness is in my vision” (Lawrence)

SOUND INTERCHANGE: Sound interchange is the way of word building when some sounds are changed to form a new word. It is non-productive in Modern English; it was productive in Old English and can be met in other Indo-European languages: e.g. to strike - stroke, to sing – song, hot - to heat (hotian), blood - to bleed (blodian) etc.

STRESS INTERCHANGE: Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent - to ac`cent. we have such pairs in English as: to af`fix -`affix, to con`flict- `conflict, to ex`port -`export, to ex`tract - `extract etc.

SOUND IMITATION: it is the way of word building when imitating different sounds forms a word. a) Sounds produced by human beings, such as: to whisper, to giggle, to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle etc.; b) Sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, such as: to hiss, to buzz, to bark, to moo, to twitter etc.; c) Sounds produced by nature and objects, such as: to splash, to rustle, to clatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle etc.

18. Synonyms and Antonyms: definition and classification.

A synonym – is a word of similar or identical meaning to one or more words in the same language. They’re no two absolutely identical words because connotations, ways of usage, frequency of an occurrence are different.

Classification: 1. Total synonyms can replace each other in any given context, without the slightest alteration in denotative or emotional meaning and connotations (e.g. noun and substantive, functional affix, flection and inflection); is a rare occasion. Ex.: бегемот – гиппопотам. 2. Ideographic synonyms. They bear the same idea but not identical in their referential content. Ex.: To happen – to occur – to befall – to chance; Look – appearance – complexion – countenance. 3. Dialectical synonyms. pertaining to different variant of language from dialectal stratification point of view; Ex.: lift – elevator; Queue – line; autumn – fall. 4. Contextual synonyms. Context can emphasize some certain semantic trades & suppress other semantic trades; words with different meaning can become synonyms in a certain context. Ex.: tasteless – dull; Active – curious; Curious – responsive. Synonyms can reflect social conventions. Ex.: clever, bright, brainy, intelligent. 5. Stylistic synonyms. Belong to different styles: child; Infant; Kid; neutral; elevated; colloquial. It refers to situations when writers or speakers bring together several words with one & the same meaning to add more conviction, to description more vivid. Ex.: Safe & sound; Lord & master; First & foremost; Safe & secure; Stress & strain; By force & violence. 6. cognitive synonyms – s. which differ in respect of the varieties of discourse in which they appear; -7. contextual/context-dependent synonyms – similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions, when the difference between the meanings of two words is contextually neutralized: e.g. buy and get. - 8. referential synonyms – a vague term, concerns coreferential expressions, when one denotatum can be defined differently from different points of view and in different aspects: e.g. names Walter Scott and the author of 'Ivanhoe' are coreferential because they refer to one and the same denotatum – Sir Walter Scott; - 9. terminological synonyms – two existing terms for one denotatum: e.g. borrowing and loan-word; concept and notion (the difference between them is not discriminated by some linguists);

Antonym- a word that expresses a meaning opposed to the meaning of another word, in which case the two words are antonyms of each other. Antonyms - words of the same category of parts of speech which have contrasting meanings such as hat - cold, light - dark, happiness - sorrow.

Morphological classification:

-Root words form absolute antonyms.(write - wrong).

-The presence of negative affixes creates - derivational antonyms(happy - unhappy).

Semantical classification:

Contradictory notions are mutually opposed and denying one another, i.e. alive means “not dead” and impatient means “not patient”.

Contrary notions are also mutually opposed but they are gradable; e.g. old and young are the most distant elements of a series like: old - middle - aged - young.

Incompatibles semantic relations of incompatibility exist among the antonyms with the common component of meaning and may be described as the relations of exclusion but not of contradiction: to say “morning” is to say “not afternoon, not evening, not night”.

19. The origin of English words: native and borrowed elements.

It is true that English vocabulary, which is one of the most extensive amongst the world's languages contains an immense number of words of foreign origin.

It should be taken into consideration that the English proper element also contains all the later formations, that is, words which were made after the 5th century according to English word-building patterns (see Ch. 5, 6) both from native and borrowed morphemes. The native element in English comprises a large number of high-frequency words like the articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries and, also, words denoting everyday objects and ideas (e. g. house, child, water, go, come, eat, good, bad, etc.). Furthermore, the grammatical structure is essentially Germanic having remained unaffected by foreign influence.

By the Indo-European element are meant words of roots common to all or most languages of the Indo-European group. English words of this group denote elementary concepts without which no human communication would be possible. The following groups can be identified.¹

Family relations: father, mother, brother, son,daughter

Parts of the human body: foot (cf. R. пядь), nose, lip, heart.

Animals: cow, swine, goose.

Plants: tree, birch (cf. R. береза), corn (cf. R. зерно).

Time of day: day, night. VI. Heavenly bodies: sun, moon, star.

Numerous adjectives: red (cf. Ukr. рудий, R. рыжий), new, glad (cf. R. гладкий),

The numerals from one to a hundred.

Pronouns — personal (Scandinavian borrowing); demonstrative.

Numerous verbs: be (cf. R. быть), stand (cf. R. стоять), sit (cf. R. сидеть), eat (cf. R. есть), know (cf. R. знать, знаю).

The Germanic element represents words of roots common to all or most Germanic languages. Some of the main groups of Germanic words are the same as in the Indo-European element.

I. Parts of the human body: head, hand, arm, finger, bone.

II. Animals: bear, fox, calf.

Plants: oak, fir, grass.

Natural phenomena: rain, frost.

V. Seasons of the year: winter, spring, summer.¹

VI. Landscape features: sea, land.

VII. Human dwellings and furniture: house, room, bench.

VIII. Sea-going vessels: boat, ship.

IX. Adjectives: green, blue, grey, white, small, thick, high, old, good.

X. Verbs: see, hear, speak, tell, say, answer, make, give, drink.

It has been mentioned that the English proper element is, in certain respects, opposed to the first two groups. Not only can it be approximately dated, but these words have another distinctive feature: they are specifically English having no cognates² in other languages whereas for Indo-European and Germanic words such cognates can always be found, as, for instance, for the following words of the Indo-European group.

Star: Germ. Stern, Lat. Stella, Gr. aster.

Sad: Germ, satt, Lat. satis, R. сыт, Snscr. sd-.

Stand: Germ, stehen, Lat. stare, R. стоять, Snscr. stha-.

Here are some examples of English proper words. These words stand quite alone in the vocabulary system of Indo-European languages: bird, boy, girl, lord, lady, woman, daisy, always.

Modern scholars estimate the percentage of borrowed words in the English vocabulary at 65—70 per cent which is an exceptionally high figure.

20. Dwell on history and morphological classification of parts of speech in eng and ukr

The history of linguistic categorization of parts of speech in Europe begins with Plato who considered some language-related philosophical questions: why a dog is called a dog and not a cat. Some attention is devoted to analyzing a sentence into two major components - the nominal one (onoma) and the verbal one (rheme). Thus, Plato approached the problem of "noun-verb" distinction in terms of "subject" versus "predicate". Since Plato's focus was purely syntactic (i.e. based on sentential analysis), Platonic "nouns" and "verbs" do not exactly correspond to nouns and verbs as these are conceived nowadays.

Aristotle added a further distinct class of "conjunctions" (covering conjunctions, pronouns and the article) to the Platonic system. This class included all those words which were neither nouns nor verbs but which served to combine nouns and verbs. Aristotle included adjectives among the "verbs". The inflectional criterion was not yet at play. Both for Plato and Aristotle, parts of speech were unambiguously parts of sentences: words became nouns or verbs only when they were put into sentences, outside of a sentence they had no categorical affiliations.

Stoic Grammarians : distinguishing the case; Alexandrian school: organized into 8 classes.

“Parts of speech” are the basic types of words that English has. Most grammar books say that there are eight parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections. We will add one more type: articles.

Here is a brief explanation of what the parts of speech are: Noun- a noun is a naming word. It names a person, place, thing, idea, living creature, quality, or action. Examples: cowboy, theatre, box, thought, tree, kindness, arrival.

Verb- a verb is a word which describes an action (doing something) or a state (being something). Examples: walk, talk, think, believe, live, like, want

Adjective- an adjective is a word that describes a noun. It tells you something about the noun. Examples: big, yellow, thin, amazing, beautiful, quick, important

Adverb- an adverb is a word which usually describes a verb. It tells you how something is done. It may also tell you when or where something happened. Examples: slowly, intelligently, well, yesterday, tomorrow, here, everywhere

Pronoun- a pronoun is used instead of a noun, to avoid repeating the noun. Examples: I, you, he, she, it, we, they

Conjunction- a conjunction joins two words, phrases or sentences together. Examples: but, so, and, because, or

Preposition- a preposition usually comes before a noun, pronoun or noun phrase. It joins the noun to some other part of the sentence. Examples: on, in, by, with, under, through, at

Interjection- an interjection is an unusual kind of word, because it often stands alone. Interjections are words which express emotion or surprise, and they are usually followed by exclamation marks. Examples: Ouch!, Hello!, Hurray!, Oh no!, Ha!

Article- an article is used to introduce a noun. Examples: the, a, an

21. Noun and its grammatical categories.

The only morphological category of the noun which is almost always marked in present-day English is that of number. Like in Ukrainian, it is mostly realized synthetically, i.e. through zero and marked inflex­ions respectively. Eg: child - children, ox - oxen, and correspond­ingly baths, cargos, jubilees, bushes, watches, countries, heroes/ vetoes, etc.

Traditionally the category of number is defined as the one that shows whether we speak of one subject or more than one. In the contrasted languages completely allomorphic, i.e. characteristic only to the English language, is the formation of plural number by way of sound interchange: foot -feet, tooth - teeth, goose - geese; man - men, woman - women; louse - lice, mouse-mice. A few simple light nouns have in Eng. one end the same form for singular and plural. Ex: ship, fish, pike, someone. Apart from generally Eng. there are some borrowed noun inflexions: curriculum- curricula, data-datum, and phenomena-phenomenon. Unlike Eng. Ukrainian number inflexions are determined by the declension root, gender of a noun, final consonant or vowel, which can be hard, soft or mixed: день-дні, море-море, крило-крила.

Isomorphic semantic groups of singularia tantum nouns:

Eng. Ukr.

1. Nouns denoting parts of the world: the north, south південь, північ, захід, схід

2. Names of materials: gold, silver, bread, coffee алюміній, мідь, цукор, сіль, пісок

3. Collective nouns: furniture, rubbish, mankind гарбузиння, селянство, жіноцтво

Abstract notions: information, business, courage, knowledge відвага, знання, прогрес, мир

Isomorphic semantic groups of pluralia tantum nouns

Eng. Ukr.

1. Some nouns like: opera classes, scales, сани, ворота, цимбали, граблі

2. Names of remains: sweepings, scraps, slops вершки, зметене, вишкребки

3. Names of some games: cards, yards, drafts, skittles шашки, карти, дротики

Some abstract and complete notions: outskirts, contents, means будні, злидні, хрестини, заручини

Some geographical names: the Urals, the Bermudes, the Carribeans Бермуди, Альпи, Черкаси

The category of case. Case shows relation of words in the sentence expressed by morphological forms of a certain nominal part of speech. English nouns have only two cases – the common case (the uninflected form) and the possessive case (the 's inflected form). Such relations are also expressed by the word order. It is mostly used only with nouns denoting living beings. E.g. my father's house, the house of my father. As to Ukr. nouns we may have 6 or 7 cases, marked singular or plural oppositions in the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative case. Group possessive. Contrary to the Ukrainian language in which the 's sign of case is related to only one word, in English the 's sign may be related to more than one word – to a whole group of words. E.g. Mary and Ann's room, the man over there's dog. The category of Gender. The classical of gender contains three members: masculine, feminine and neuter. The morphological category of gender in Ukr. is identified through separate inflexions of nouns, the inflexions of attributes “adjectives” and the inflexions of verbs that conjugate with the noun. E.g. ріс молодий каштан, текла холодна вода, бігло маленьке лоша. In comparison with English the majority of scientists believe that the grammatical category of gender had disappeared from the English language by the end of the Middle English period. What has survived the time is the possibility of lexical indication of the biological sex. Means that provide this indication are purely lexical and derivational. E.g. boy-girl, bull-cow, sheep-goat, and suffixes:- ist scientist- er/or actor, emperor- ess actress- o hero- ine heroine All likeless things in Eng. unlike in Ukr. are generally associated with pronoun it (and in Ukr. that is neuter). The tree and its leaves. A stone and its age. In Ukr. on the contrary each noun irrespective of its being alike or likeless belongs to a complete vocabulary, gender. E.g. stone and wolf in Eng.→ it; in Ukr.→ ч.р. In spoken English some life and lifeless nouns may be referred to different genders when they are personified. E.g. sheep→ she. The names of vessels and vehicles like coach, car, carriage are usually associated with feminine gender. So are the names of hotels and inns. The names of celestial voice may be of 3 genders: the sun is he; the moon, paradise is she.

22. The problem of the category of tense

The idea of locating situations in time is a purely conceptual notion. All the events are referred to one of the three time dimensions – the present, the past or the future. All human languages have ways of locating in time but they do differ in lexicon and grammar in establishing location in time. The Ukrainian language the objective time has the three mentioned above dimensions. English offers much more forms for the expression. The three temporal dimensions can be expressed by means of different English verb forms: Indefinite (Present, Past, Future), Continuous (Present, Past, Future), Perfect (Present, Past, Future), Perfect Continuous (Present, Past, Future).

When we speak about the category of tense in English several problems arise. One of them is even connected with a number of tense aspect form. The matter is that the category of tense in English is inseparably connected with the category of aspect (indefinite, continuous). Thus, speaking about the problem of the category of tense in English we cannot but mention the problem of polysemy of the English grammatical form. E.g. the form "speak" expresses 6 different grammatical categories. It is not an easy question to answer how many tense are there in English. Some scientists say that English has 16 tenses if one takes into account that tense is expressed by the form which points to the category of aspect. At this we must add that they are in the active voice. But if to take into account the fact that we don't disregard the category of aspect, then we should not disregard the passive voice. If to take into account the polysemy and the possibility for English to have active and passive for transitive verbs then the statistics count about 26 tense - aspect- voice forms of which 16 are in the active and only 10 are in the passive forms. Speaking about the problem of the category of tense and the category of aspect we must solve the question of what they belong to. The category of tense answers the question "when", that's it relates to the type of the action. The category of aspect usually answers the question "how", it doesn't relate to the type of the action, but rather to the manner of that action. So, this category is not a temporal category. Category of tense is realised both synthetically and analytically

Isomorphism also exists a) in the correlation of the time of action in the matrix close with the time of the expressed action in the subordi nate clause: He says she lives in Kyiv. He said she lived in Kyiv. He will say she will live in Kyiv. Or: she will say that she lived in Kyiv or she thought that she came/would come. Or: 1 thought she had come. Similarly in Ukrainian: Він каже, що вона прийшла; він скаже, що вона прийде/що вона вже приходила; він казав, що вона приходила/ приходила була; b) Isomorphism is also observed in the existence of tenses not correlating with the time of actions expressed in the matrix/ main clause, eg: He -will say that he knows/ knew, had known it. Він скаже, що вона пришила (приходила) приходила була; с) Iso morphism is likewise observed in the existence of some identical forms expressing those same subjunctive mood meanings referring to present or future or to some past action/event. For example: