“Those who have what to eat - sometimes they cannot eat, while others can eat, but sit without bread. And here we have what we have, and at the same time we have what we have, which means that we only have to thank the sky! In the humorous poem “He althy Toast” by the English poet Robert Burns, there is a real clash of the words “eat”, which in one case means “to be, be”, and in the other - “to eat”. What kind of battle is this: between whom and what? Meet - homonymous parts of speech. Examples ahead.
Homonyms
Between words in any language, as well as between people in society, certain relationships are found, the nature of which develops depending on the meanings expressed by these lexical units and on their phonetic design. From this there are three main types: synonymous,antonymous, homonymous. The latter is what we have to deal with. So, what are homonyms in Russian?
The essence of such a phenomenon as homonymy is the identity, the coincidence of sound - the sound image of two or more words with a complete difference in meaning. There is a further division into the following groups:
- Lexical homonyms, otherwise - complete (light - light energy; light - earth, universe, world);
- Incomplete, which, in turn, are divided into types. Among the latter, there are: homophones or phonetic homonyms - different in meaning and spelling, but similar in sound (point - assessment and ball - an evening of dancing); homographs - different meanings, sound, but the same spelling (castle - building and castle - fixation device); homoforms or morphological homonyms - different in meaning, sometimes in belonging to parts of speech, but similar in sound only in certain morphological forms.
Here, on the question of what homonyms are in Russian, we will put an end to it and dwell on morphological homonyms in more detail.
Actual grammatical homonyms
This is a fairly large and heterogeneous group of homonyms, which is also divided into species. Actually grammatical homonyms are lexical units that are identical both in sound and spelling, but belonging to different parts of speech, and, accordingly, differ in lexical meaning, morphological, grammatical features, and role in the sentence. For example, the word "what" might be:an interrogative or relative pronoun ("What was he looking for in the back room?"); an adverb meaning “why”, “for what”, “why”, “for what reason” (“Why don’t you read such an interesting book?”); union (“I told you I was going to Africa, but you didn’t believe”); particle (usually used at the beginning of poems).
Other species
This group of homonyms - homoforms, is intensively replenished with word pairs that involve both lexical and grammatical analysis. These are homonymous parts of speech. As they say, what is it and what is it eaten with? This should be de alt with on a case-by-case basis.
Adverbs
Homonymous parts of speech need to be distinguished from each other, and there are certain techniques for this. For example, there are many adverbs that must be distinguished from homonymous nouns, adjectives, gerunds, pronouns. For what? For correct use in speech and avoid spelling errors, since these pairs are pronounced the same, but differ in semantics and spelling.
In sentences, an adverb differs from a noun by the presence or absence of a dependent word. The noun has it, the second does not. For example, the word "(to) a meeting": "He hardly got up to meet" - an adverb in the meaning of "forward"; “My expectations for a meeting with an old friend did not materialize” - for a (long-awaited) meeting with the dependent word “friend”, a noun with a preposition. By the same principle, we distinguish between adverbs andadjective. For example, “(in) autumn”: “The sun was already shining in autumn” - an adverb, the correct spelling through a hyphen; “Lead clouds raced across the autumn sky” - the adjective depends on the noun “sky” and agrees with it in gender, number and case, the preposition is written separately.
But when distinguishing adverbs and such service parts of speech as particles, prepositions, conjunctions, you just need to ask a question to the word of interest and choose a synonym. As an example, let's take the word "past": "Children ran merrily past the stairs" - a preposition, the question is not posed, it is possible to replace "before, behind"; “Running past, he shouted loudly” – an adverb meaning “near, close, not far.”
Unions
We continue to consider such a phenomenon as morphological homonymy. It contains many difficult, rather confusing cases, including the spelling of homonymous parts of speech. Examples will help you see and understand the differences between them.
Special attention should be paid to such unions as "so that, because, also, too, because, but." The union "to" has its homonymous brother - the interrogative-relative pronoun "what" and the particle "would". How to distinguish them? After all, you can not make a spelling mistake. Firstly, if the particle “would” can be omitted or transferred to another part of the sentence, and the word “what” is selected as a noun, then we have a pronoun. For example: “What would he draw? What should he draw? What would he draw? “Would you like to draw a picture for him?” And, secondly, in place of one union, you can alwaysput another. We read: “I came to you to talk about the accumulated problems. “I came to you to talk about the accumulated problems.”
Also, too
Unions "also, too" were in this series for a reason. They, like the previous "heroes", have their own homonymous parts of speech - an adverb with the particle "same" and a pronoun with the particle "same". To understand that we have unions, we need to replace them with each other or with the union “and” (“We love fiction, he also loves=he also loves=and he loves”). This is the first way.
In adverbs and pronouns, the particle “same” can be omitted or replaced, but not in conjunction (“She wanted the same as we=She wanted what we did”). In addition, the question is not posed to the union, but to the adverb and pronoun - yes. (“She wanted the same (what exactly?) as we; She swam the same (how? how exactly?) as we do”). This is the second way.
But, because, because
We continue the topic and turn to new, no less interesting points: the continuous and separate spelling of homonymous parts of speech “but, because, because”. It is correct to write them together if they are unions, and separately if they are pronouns with prepositions. How to recognize them? The techniques are the same as in the above examples.
You can always pick up another union for the union: “on the other hand - but, because - because, because - because” (“He is a bad artist, but (but) a good decorator”). In combinations “for that, from that, for that”, the pronouns “that, that, that” are easy to replace with a noun or adjectiveand put appropriate questions to them (“I want to express my gratitude to you for (for what?) that you came to our holiday”)
Prepositions
Spelling homonymous parts of speech (look for exercises in textbooks on the Russian language) is a rather complicated topic. Therefore, we continue to study the issue in detail.
So, prepositions and other homonymous parts of speech. Here it should be remembered that the task of prepositions is to connect two words that form a phrase. They are derivative and non-derivative. The first ones should be separated from the homonymous parts of speech. Here are some examples:
- “The apartment was put in order within one month. “Suddenly, there is a sharp turn in the course of the river.”
- “We traveled all over Italy for a month. - There are unexpected storylines in the continuation of the novel.”
- "Due to lack of time, I did not finish the work. “I asked him what he meant.”
- "Thanks to his new ideas, we have completed this task. - The guests gradually dispersed, thanks to the hostess for a wonderful dinner.”
What is what
In the first sentence, the combination “during” is a derivative preposition with the ending -e, as it is used in the meaning of time and answers the questions “how long? when?" It is devoid of independent lexical meaning, is inextricably linked with the noun. In the second case, the homonym "during" is a noun with a preposition, because an adjective can be put between them, toFor example, "in a fast current." We write the ending -i according to the general rules for declension of nouns.
In the third sentence, we are dealing with the preposition "to continue" at the end with the letter -e. As in the first example, it has the meaning of time, depending on the noun. In the fourth sentence, "in continuation" is a noun with a preposition, since you can use an adjective between them. Before us is a typical homonymy of words of different parts of speech.
In the fifth variant, the word "in view" is written together, since it indicates the reason and, therefore, is a preposition. In the sixth sentence, we are dealing with a noun with the preposition "in mind" and we write separately. "View" is the initial form, which is in the singular, in the prepositional case.
In the seventh case, we are faced with the use of the preposition "thanks" because it is impossible to ask a question and do without it. And in the eighth - we meet with the homonymous gerund participle "thanks", since it denotes an additional action to the main one, the expressed predicate "diverged", and forms a participle turnover.
We hope that the article on the topic "Homonymous parts of speech: definition, spelling, examples" will help to cope with all the difficulties in learning the Russian language.
