Дипломная работа: Homonyms in English and their specific features
“Above” – prep., adv., adj.; “act”- n., v.; “after” - prep., adv., conj.; “age” – n., v.; “back” – n., adv., v.; “ball” – n., v.; “bank”
We may give the other examples: by, can, case, close, country, course, cross, direct, draw, drive, even, faint, flat, fly, for, game, general, hard, hide, hold, home, just, kind, last, leave, left, lie, light, like, little, lot, major, march, match, may, mean, might, mind, miss, part, plain, plane, plate, right, round, sharp, sound, spare, spell, spring, square, stage, stamp, try, type, volume, watch, well, will, etc.
For the most part all these words are cases of patterned lexico-grammatical homonymy taken from the minimum vocabulary of the elementary stage: the above homonyms mostly differ within each group grammatically but possess some lexical invariant. That is to say, act v follows the standard four-part system of forms with a base form act, an s-form (act-s), a Past Tense form (acted) and an -ing- form (acting) and takes up all syntactic functions of verbs, whereas act n can have two forms, act (singular.) and acts (plural). Semantically both contain the most generalized component rendering the notion of doing something.
Recent investigations have shown that it is quite possible to establish and to formalize the differences in environment, syntactical or lexical, serving to signal which of the several inherent values is to be ascribed to the variable in a given context.
An example of distributional analysis will help to make this point clear. The distribution of a lexico-semantic variant of a word may be represented as a list of structural patterns in which it occurs and the data on its combining power. Some of the most typical structural patterns for a verb are: N + V -f- N, N + V –f- Prep.; V- N, N-f-V-f-Adj., N + V + Adv., N + V + t o –f- V and some others. Patterns for nouns are far less studied, but for the present case one very typical example will suffice. This is the structure article for A + N. In the following extract from "A Taste of Honey" by Sheath
Delaney the morpheme “laugh” occurs three times:
1.I can't stand people who laugh at other people.
2. They'd get a bigger laugh, if they laughed at themselves.
We recognize laugh used first and last here as a verb because the formula is N + laugh + prep + N and so the pattern is in both cases \ -[-V H-prep — N. In the beginning of the second sentence laugh is a noun and the pattern is article -f- A -J- N.
This elementary example can give a very general idea of the procedure which can be used for solving more complicated
99Distributional analysis of this type is of great practical importance both in foreign language teaching and in machine translation. In order to translate a sentence the machine must analyze it, i.e. determine the types of elementary configurations that constitute it. Practically speaking, the pupil even if taught by patterns, must do the same. Elementary configurations are not mere word-groups but combinations of word classes. Therefore in the process of identification of the symbols given, it is necessary to establish to what classes they belong. As homonymy prevents this, the first step to be taken in machine translation aims at getting rid of homonymy. The system of formal rules aimed at revealing and eliminating lexico-grammatical homonymy in machine translation has been described by T. Moloshnaya. l These rules begin with morphological criteria: if the word form considered has an ending typical of one class and impossible in all others, its class is thus determined. Laughed is obviously a verb, as the noun does not take the ending -ed. Of the two homonyms complete v and complete adj. only the verb can have such endings as -ed, -ing. When the morphological data are exhausted, syntactical combinations are analyzed.
Without attempting to give a more detailed analysis of these operations since they belong rather to grammar than to lexicology, we may sum up our discussion by pointing out that whereas distinction between polysemy and homonymy is relevant and important for lexicography it is not relevant for the practice of either human or machine translation. The reason for this is that different variants of a polysemantic word are not less conditioned by context than lexical homonyms. In both cases the identification of the necessary meaning is based on the corresponding .distribution that can signal it and must be present in the memory either of the pupil or the machine. The distinction between patterned and non-patterned homonymy, greatly underrated until now, is of far greater importance. In non-patterned homonymy every unit is to be learned separately both from the lexical and grammatical points of view. In patterned homonymy when one knows the lexical meaning of a given word in one part of speech, one can accurately predict the meaning when the same sound complex occurs in some other part of speech, provided, of course, that there is sufficient context to guide one.
5.2.2 Homonyms may be also classified by the type of meaning into lexical, lexico-grammatical and grammatical homonyms
In seal n and seal n, e.g., the part-of-speech meaning of the word and the grammatical meanings of all its forms are identical. (cf. seal [si:l] Common Case Singular, seal's [si:lz] Possessive Case Singular for both seal* and sea!2). The difference is confined to lexical meaning only or, to be more exact, to the denotational component: seal denotes 'a sea animal', 'the fur of this animal', etc., seaI2—'a design printed on paper, the stamp by which the design is made', etc. So we can say that seal 2 and seal are lexical homonyms as they differ in lexical meaning.
If we compare seal —'a sea animal' and (to) seal 3—'to close tightly', we shall observe not only a difference in the lexical meaning of their homonymous word-forms, but a difference in their grammatical meanings as well. Identical sound-forms, i.e. seals [si:lz] (Common Case Plural of the noun) and (he) seals [si:lz] (third person Singular of the (verb) possess each of them different grammatical meanings. As both grammatical and lexical meanings differ we describe these homonymous word-forms as lexico-grammatical homonymy.
Lexico-grammatical homonymy generally implies that the homonyms in question belong to different parts of speech as the part-of-speech meaning is a blend of the lexical and grammatical semantic components. There may be cases however when lexico-grammatical homonymy is observed within the same part of speech as, e.g., in the verbs (to) find [faind] and (to) found [faund], where homonymic word-forms: found [faund]—Past Tense of (to) find and found [faund]—Present Tense of (to) found differ both grammatically and lexically. Modern English abounds in homonymic word-forms differing in grammatical meaning only. In the paradigms of the majority of verbs the form of the Past Tense is homonymous with the form of Participle II, e.g. asked [a:sktl—asked [a:skt]; in the paradigm of nouns we usually find homonymous forms of the Possessive Case Singular and the Common Case Plural, e.g. : brother’s . It may be easily observed that grammatical homonymy is the homonymy of different word-forms of one and the same word. The two classifications: full and partial homonymy and lexical, lexico-grammatical and grammatical homonymy are not mutually exclusive. All homonyms may be described on the basis of the two criteria—homonymy