22. Homonymy and Polysemy.

When several related meanings are associated with the same group of sounds within one part of speech, the word is called polysemantic. When two or more unrelated meanings are associated with the same form — the words are homonyms.

Criteria for distinguishing: 1) Cases sound convergence (phonetically distinct at an earlier date) of two or more words may be safely regarded as cases of homonymy, eg: race (running) and race (a distinct ethnical stock). 2) Semantic criterion of related or unrelated meanings. Various meanings is apprehended by the speaker – polysemy. Thus the semantic criterion implies that the difference between polysemy and homonymy is actually reduced to the differentiation between related and unrelated meanings. 3) The criterion of distribution ( in cases of lexico-grammatical and grammatical homonymy). EG: paper — (to) paper the noun may be preceded by the article and followed by a verb. 4) The criterion of spelling: Homonyms differing in graphic form (knight-night) are easily perceived to be two different lexical.

No formal means have as yet been found to differentiate between several meanings of one word and the meanings of its homonyms. There are cases of lexical homonymy when none of the criteria is of any avail. In such cases the demarcation line between polysemy and homonymy is rather fluid. Sources of Homonyms (Антрушина)

1) Phonetic changes (to write (writan) - right (reht)); 2) Borrowing (piece — peace -> 1 from O.F. pais, and 2 from O.F. pettia.); 3) Word-building (conversion comb, n. — to comb, v.). 4) Shortening (fan, n. in the sense of "an enthusiastic admirer" Latin borrowing fan, n. which means веер. 5)sound-imitation (mew, n. ("the sound a cat makes") — mew, n. (= a sea gull = чайка)). 6) Split polysemy: 2 or more homonyms originate from different meanings of the same word, the semantic structure of the word breaks into several parts.