词汇学论文

Use Homonymy to Analyze the Sentences

July, 2013

I. Introduction

At the beginning of the thesis, it’s quite important for us to realize the necessity and the value of learning the knowledge of English lexicology.

What’s more, the reasons of choosing “Homonymy” also need to be explained.

In recent years, quite a great number of colleges and universities have offered English lexicology courses. From this point of view, we can infer that the experts have paid a great attention to this course.

As for the language learners, language study involves the study of speech sounds, grammar, and vocabulary. A student of any language must study the three components of the language. Since English Lexicology deals with English words, naturally the student of English should study English Lexicology. Lexicology aims to help the students summarize what we have learned and acquire a systematic knowledge of English vocabulary so that we can improve our ability to enlarge our personal vocabularies and choose the right words to use in a given context, just as Wallace, Michael J. Mentioned in Teaching Vocabulary, “there is a sense in which learning a foreign language is basically a matter of learning the vocabulary of that language. Not being able to find the words you need to express yourself is the most frustrating experience in speaking another language.”

And homonymy can be regarded as one of the most interesting part in this course. It’s widely used in quite a large number of occasions, such as advertisement, film, literature, daily life dialogues and so on to achieve humorous or other unexpected memorable effects.

In the following 3 parts, I am going to explain homonymy in detail including the definition, classifications, differences between other items, examples, and the conclusion based on the descriptions mentioned above.

II. Homonymy

There are five sense relations in English Lexicology, polysemy, homonymy, synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy. During our learning experience, we find that we are usually confused between polysemy and homonymy.

“Context plays a very important role in the hearer‟s interpretation of words of two special types:different words of like form(homonymy) and words of several meanings(polysemy). The punster often makes use of both polysemy and homonymy to achieve humor.” (Textbook). In other words, polysemy is the same word that has a range of different meanings.

While homonyms are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling that is sound-alike or look-alike. And based on the degree of similarity, homonymy can be classified into three types:perfect homonyms, homophones and homographs.

Perfect homonyms are the words identical in sound and spelling but different in meaning. Words identical in sound but different in spelling and meaning are called homophones. And words identical in spelling but different in sound and meaning are called homographs. And this can be seen clearly through the table below: (√: the same; x: different)

category sound spelling meaning Perfect homonym √√x

homophone √x x

homograph x √x There are four sources of homonyms: phonetic convergence, semantic divergence, foreign influence and shortening.Converging sound development is the most common cause of homonymy. “When two or more meanings of the same word drift apart to such an extent that there will be no obvious connection between them, polysemy will give place to homonymy.”(Ullmann 1977:177). Homonyms may also be created by the word-formation process of clipping.