Synonyms, paronyms, antonyms, homonyms - these words, familiar to everyone from school, probably caused difficulties in learning. The difficulty in remembering these terms and their essence arises not only among schoolchildren. Due to the uselessness of use, adults can also get confused about what is what. Let's talk about homonyms. In the most general sense, these are words that sound the same, that is, they have the same pronunciation. But not everything is so simple. Consider the concept of homonymy in more detail.
Speaking about homonyms in general, we can conclude that homonyms are words that have completely different meanings, although they coincide in sound or spelling. But the homonymy does not end there. Researchers understand homonymy differently because of the difference in the question of what a language form is. Some linguists consider it as an exclusively sound shell, while others include spelling in the concept of linguistic form. Therefore, there are various classifications of homonyms.
According to conventional wisdomopinion and classification, homonyms are a common name for homographs, homophones and absolute homonyms. Homophones are words that are read the same, well, or almost the same, but are written differently, that is, they have a different graphic form with the same phonetic. Homonyms
English language vividly illustrate this. For example, bear/bare. Although these words are pronounced the same, they have different meanings - bear / bare, bare.
Read/red - read/red - [red - red].
In contrast, homographs, on the contrary, are written the same way, but read differently. For example, even the present and past form of one verb read
read/read - [ri:d - red] can be a homograph.
English homonymy affects not only parts of speech, but also morphemes, for example, endings -ing long tenses and gerund forms.
Absolute homonyms, in turn, differ in semantic meaning and part-of-speech. For example, three identical words
match/match/match have the meanings fit - fit, contest - competition, person - a suitable person, "soulmate", team member.
Linguists divide homonym words into full and partial. Homonyms are called complete if they coincide throughout the paradigm, in other words, they are the same in all forms of the word. Partials can only coincide in certain forms of words. Quoting V. Vinogradov, we can say that partial homonyms are more of a trait,characteristic of the so-called inflectional languages (i.e., for languages in which words are formed with the help of endings, or inflections). But in English, this linguistic phenomenon is also not uncommon.
There is another classification of homonyms. In accordance with it, grammatical, lexical and lexico-grammatical types of homonyms are distinguished. Lexical
homonyms differ in meaning, that is, lexically, although they are grammatically the same. For example, – light/light, physical phenomenon and world;
– boxer/boxer, dog breed and boxing athlete;
– pen/pen, doorknob and writing pen.
Grammatical homonyms, although they have a semantic (semantic) commonality, are different parts of speech. For example, English words
mere (n.) - a small lake, and mere (adv.) - nothing more than just grammatical homonyms.
Lexico-grammatical homonyms are words that have the same spelling but are different in sound and meaning. For example, then / then - adv. then TV. n. (by whom? with what?) then (Them. n. sweat).
