Дипломная работа: Homonymy in the book of Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland"

His fees were high, his lessons were light. (O'Henry)

An overview of the classifications presented here shows rather varied approaches to practically the same material. And even though they contain inconsistencies and certain contradictions they reflect the scholars' attempts to overcome an inventorial description of devices. They obviously bring stylistic study of expressive means to an advanced level, sustained by the linguistic research of the 20th century that allows to explore and explain the linguistic nature of the stylistic function. This contribution into stylistic theory made by modern linguistics is not contained to classifying studies only. It has inspired exploration of other areas of research such as decoding stylistics or stylistic grammar that will be discussed in further chapters.

carroll book expressive mean

II.2 Homonyms

Many words, especially characterized by a high frequency rating, are not connected with meaning by a one relation-ship. On the contrary, one symbol as a rule serves to render several different meanings. The phenomenon may be said to be the reverse of synonymy where several symbols correspond to one meaning. Two or more words identical in sound and spelling but different in meaning, distribution and (in many cases) origin are called homonyms. The term is derived from Greek (homos 'similar' and onoma 'name') and thus expresses very well the sameness of name combined with the difference in meaning.

E. g. bank, n.- a shore

bank, n.-an institution for receiving, lending, exchanging money

ball, n. — a sphere; any spherical body

ball, n.- a large dancing party

English vocabulary is rich in such pairs and even groups of words. Their identical forms are mostly accidental : the majority of homonyms coincided due to phonetic changes which they suffered during their development.

Homonymy exists in many languages, but in English it is particularly frequent, especially among monosyllabic words. In the list of 2,540 homonyms given in the Oxford English Dictionary 89% are monosyllabic words and only 9,1% are words of two syllables. From the viewpoint of their morphological structure, they are mostly one-morpheme words.

If synonyms and antonyms can be regarded as the treasury of the language's expressive resources, homonyms are of no interest in this respect, and one cannot expect them to be of particular value for communication. Metaphorically speaking, groups of homonyms and pairs of antonyms are created by the vocabulary system with a particular purpose whereas homonyms are accidental creations, and therefore purposeless.

In the process of communication they are more of an encumbrance, leading sometimes to confusion and misunderstanding. Yet it is this very characteristic which makes them one of the most important sources of popular humour.

The pun is a joke based upon the play upon words of similar form but different meaning (i.e. on homonyms) as in the following: "A tailor guarantees to give each of his customers a perfect fit."

(The joke is based on the homonyms: 1 .fit, n.-perfectly fitting clothes; 2.fit,u. — a nervous spasm)

Homonyms which are the same in sound and spelling (as the example given in the beginning of this chapter) are traditionally termed homonyms proper.

The following joke is based on a pun which makes use of another type of homonyms:

"Waiter!"

"Yes, sir."

"What's this? " "It's bean soup. "

"Never mind what it has been. I want to know what it is now."

Bean, n.-and bean, Past Part, of to be are homophones. As the example shows they are the same in sound but different in spelling. Here are some more examples of homophones:

Night, n.- knight, n.; piece, n. -peace, n. ; scent, n. -cent, n. - sent, v. (Past Indef., Past Perf., of to send); rite, n.-to write, v.-right, adj.; sea, n.-to see, v.-C[si:] (the name of a letter).

The third type of homonyms is called homographs. These are words which are the same in spelling but different in sound.

E.g. to bow [bau],v.-to incline the head or body in salutation

bow [bju],n.-a flexible strip of wood for propelling arrows

to lead [li:d],v.-to conduct on the way, go before to show the way lead [led],n.-a heavy, rather soft metal

to tear [tea-], v.-to pull apart or in piece by force

tear [tw],n.-a drop of the fluid secreted by the lacrimal glands of the eye