When learning the Russian language, you come across a lot of terms. In the "Vocabulary" section, there are more than two dozen terms that allow you to explain various phenomena in the vocabulary of the Russian language. The difference between polysemantic words and homonyms is described later in this article.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the main section of linguistics. It consists of units - words with which we can formulate our thoughts. When we frame our thoughts with words, we mean what these words mean. Such meanings of words are fixed in dictionaries.
Each dictionary entry correlates the sound shell of a word with the object or phenomenon that it denotes. The lexical meaning of the entire set of features of the word names the most basic ones, those that are considered as meaningful.
A word without meaning cannot exist. And here it is necessary to say about such a phenomenon in the Russian language: some words haveone meaning (for example, bandage, analgin, trolleybus, noun, etc.), while some have several (for example, fire in the furnace and in the shower, shirt sleeve and river, etc.).
There are a lot of unambiguous words in Russian, usually these are terms, names of animals, plants or the name of some profession. For example, syntax, roe deer, birch, neuropathologist. If everything is clear with this group, then the second one may cause some difficulties in defining: here we must talk about two terms that differ from each other. These are homonyms and polysemantic words.
Words that have the same meaning allow us to build our speech clearly and understandably. With the other group, the situation is more complicated: their meaning can only be understood from the context.
Examples of homonyms and polysemantic words, when carefully studied, show the main differences between these groups from each other.
Polysemantic words
When we pronounce a certain sound set, with which several objects or phenomena of reality are associated in our minds, then we are dealing with a polysemantic word.
For example, with the word "star" you can imagine a star in the sky, a showbiz star, a starfish.
Polysemantic words in Russian are not uncommon. These are the most frequently used words. They can have many meanings. So, for example, the word "go" in Ozhegov's dictionary has twenty-six meanings. Among them are: time goes (passes), the clock goes (shows time), it rains (drips), a person goes(moves), the coat goes (fits the face), etc.
Meanings of a polysemantic word have a common component. For example, this is the "direction" of the word "road": paved road, road to the house, road of life, journey.
All meanings of a polysemantic word are divided into two groups: the first - the main direct, and derivatives - figurative. The second is the result of the transfer of the sound-letter shell of the word to another object on some basis. For example, the word "hat" means "headdress" and "part of a mushroom", a common feature of "a round brim".
As a result of such a transfer, a metaphor and metonymy can turn out. Metaphor is a transfer based on similarity: in form (bell button); by color (gray clouds); location (aircraft tail), by function (entrance visor). Metonymy paints an emotional picture (storm of applause - loud applause, living in a hole - bad).
Now let's see how polysemantic words differ from homonyms.
Homonyms
This is another group of words in Russian. They have similarities in spelling and pronunciation, but mean completely different things. For example, a scythe is a woman's hairstyle and an agricultural tool, glasses are a device for improving eyesight and score in the game.
Thus, similarity in some way is what distinguishes polysemantic words from homonyms.
Types of homonyms
Homonyms are divided into the following types:
- homographs are wordsspelled the same but pronounced differently; for example, "castle" - "castle";
- homophones – they sound the same but are spelled differently; for example, "raft" - "fruit";
- homoforms are words that coincide in some grammatical form; for example, "glass" is a noun and a past tense verb.
Differences
The modern poet Alexander Kushner has a poem "We and Bill the Foreigner", where both homonyms and polysemantic words are clearly presented: the differences between these two groups are very clear.
We admired the walruses on the Neva, As they swam, squeezed by ice.
And a foreigner named Bill
He was with us and surprised everyone:
You say it's a walrus, Why is she wearing a cap like a swimmer?”…
“It’s a pity,” I said, “that Muscovites are in the finals
Glasses taken away from Leningraders.”
And a foreigner named Bill
He was with us and surprised everyone:
“Give,” he said, “to get to New York, I will send glasses to dear Leningraders.”
Possible words name objects that have a similar feature. The word walrus is ambiguous in this poem - a large northern sea animal and a lover of winter swimming. The common semantic part that unites these meanings is the ability to swim in icy water.
A foreigner named Bill did not understand the meaning of the word glasses. He thought it was a subject to improve vision, and inThe poem talks about the score in a sports game. There is no similarity between the lexical meanings of these words. These are homonyms.
Dictionaries can be used to distinguish these terms. With the help of special marks, they show which words are polysemantic and which are homonyms.
Reasons for the emergence of homonyms
Linguists explain the reasons for the appearance of homonyms in Russian.
- Borrowings lead to the fact that a foreign word can match in spelling and sound. For example, the German word "marriage" (lack), having appeared in our language, coincided with the Russian "marriage" (family relations).
- When word formation using the tools available in the language (roots and affixes), the same words also appear. For example, the word "hillfort" with the meaning "place of an ancient settlement" coincided with the later formed identical, but with the meaning "huge city".
- There is a change in native Russian words under the influence of processes operating in the language. For example, the word "bow", which meant "ancient weapon", has acquired a new meaning "garden plant".
- The disintegration of a polysemantic word also leads to the appearance of homonyms. So the word "light" in the meaning of "universe, world" acquired a new "dawn, morning".
Knowing the processes that take place in the language, you can understand how polysemantic words differ from homonyms.
