Реферат: Homonymy in English

A. Simple lexico-grammatical partial homonyms are words, which belong to the same category of parts of speech. Their paradigms have only one identical form, but it is never the same form, as will be soon from the examples:

(to) found v

found v (past indef., past part. of to find )

(to) lay v

lay v (past indef. of to lie )

(to) bound v

bound v (past indef., past part. of to bind )

B. Complex lexico-grammatical partial homonyms are words of different categories of parts of speech, which have identical form in their paradigms.

Rose n

Rose v (past indef. of to ri se)

Maid n

Made v (past indef., past part. of to make )

Left adj

Left v (past indef., past part. of to leave )

Bean n

Been v (past part. of to be )

One num

Won v (past indef., past part. of to win )

C. Partial lexical homonyms are words of the same category of parts of speech which are identical only in their corresponding forms.

to lie (lay, lain) v

to lie (lied, lied) v

to hang (hung, hung) v

to hang (hanged, hanged) v

to can (canned, canned)

(I) can (could)

C. Other aspects of classification

Various types of classification for homonyms have been suggested.

A comprehensive system may be worked out if we are guided by the theory of oppositions and in classifying the homonyms take into consideration the difference or sameness in their lexical and grammatical meaning, paradigm and basic form.

As both form and meaning can be further subdivided, the combination of distinctive features by which two words are compared becomes more complicated – there are four features: the form may be phonetical and graphical, the meaning – lexical and grammatical, a word may also have a paradigm of grammatical forms different from the basic form.

The distinctive features shown in the table below are lexical meaning (different denoted by A, or nearly the same denoted by A1), grammatical meaning (different denoted by B, or same by B1), paradigm (different denoted by C, or same denoted by C1), and basic form (different denoted by D, and same denoted by D1).