The basic notions of semantic relations. Polysemy and homonymy.

Polysemy denotes having a lot of meanings. Every meaning in the language is signalled either by the form of the word itself or by context. The unity of the form and content of a polysemantic word is kept in its lexico-grammatical variant. The semantic structure of a word is a set of interrelated lexico-grammatical variants with different denotative and sometimes connotative components of meaning. A separate word in a dictionary is usually given with all its meanings (the semantic structure of a word in language), but taken in any definite context, the word has only the meaning required by the text. For example, the word act has the meanings “ do something, behave, take part in a play, pretend ”; From the synchronic point of view there: 1)General vs. special/part icular: the general meaning occurs in various and widely different contexts; special meanings can be found only in certain contexts 2)Central/main vs. minor/peripheral: the meaning that first occurs to us when we hear the cluster of sounds, i.e. the most frequent meaning of the word is the central one. All other meanings are minor in comparison. 3)Primary vs. secondary/derived: in the dictionary the primary meaning is placed first. For example, in the word table the primary meaning is “ a piece of furniture ”, but “ the food put on the table ” is secondary. 4)Direct vs. Figurative: the meaning can be figurative and direct. It is direct when it nominates the referent without the help of the context—in isolation. It is figurative when the object is named and at the same time characterized through its similarity with another object: mouth – “part of a face” (dir.), “some opening” (fig.). From the diachronic point of view we distinguish between two schemes of the development of polysemy: 1)Radiation is a semantic process in which the primary meaning stands in the centre and the secondary meanings proceed out of it in every direction like rays: paper — scientific article, money, document, newspaper, examination work. 2)Concatenation is the semantic process in which the meaning of a word moves gradually away from its first signification by successive shifts of meanings: the word board – a piece of timber, an extended surface of wood, a table, any piece of furniture resembling a table, as dressing-board, side-board. They are closely connected; being different stages of the same semantic process Radiation always precedes concatenation.

Homonyms are words, which are identical in sound or spelling but different in meaning. There can appear even syntactic homonymy (syntactic ambiguity, also called amphiboly or amphibology), which is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. For example, the sentence I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola can mean “ Lola and I are both glad I’m a man ” or “ I’m glad Lola and I are both men ”; Homonyms may be divided into lexical (belong to one and the same part of speech and the grammatical meanings of all their forms are identical, but they are different in their lexical meaning: ball – a round object used in games and ball – a gathering of people for dancing), lexico-grammatical (differ both in lexical and grammatical meanings as well as belong to different parts of speech: bear – an animal and bear – to carry) and grammatical (differ in grammatical meaning: stopped – the Past Indefinite and stopped – Participle II ). According to the traditional formal classification homonyms are divided into the following groups: 1)Absolute homonyms (homonyms proper) are words identical both in sounding and in graphic form though different in meaning: bear – ведмідь and bear – родити, bark – a noise made by a dog and bark – a sailing ship. 2)Homophones (phonetic homonyms) are words identical in sounding but different both in spelling and meaning. E.g., I – eye, nose – know, біль – білль. 3)Homographs (graphic homonyms) are words identical in spelling but different both in their sound-form and meaning: дере΄вина (одиничне дерево) and дереви΄на (матеріал для виготовлення різних предметів), wind (wind) and (waind), lead (li:d) and (led). 4)Homoforms (grammatical homonyms) coincide only in some of their paradigm constituents: English provided – PII of provide and provided – коли, за умови; ніс (частина тіла) and ніс (від нести). From the viewpoint of their origin, homonyms are divided into: Etymologica l homonyms are words of different origin. Their formal coincidence is the result of various factors: phonetical changes in native and borrowed words, changes in spelling: OE mal > NE mole I (родимка) Historical homonyms are those which result from disintegration (splitting) of polysemy. they can be traced back to the same etymological source: beam (промінь) – beam (балка) < OE beam.