When learning the Russian language, you come across a lot of terms. In the section "Vocabulary" there are more than two dozen terms that explain various phenomena in the vocabulary of the Russian language. What distinguishes ambiguous words from homonyms is described later in this article.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is the main section of linguistics. It consists of units - words, with the help of which we can formulate our thoughts. Making out our thoughts with the help of words, we mean what these words mean. Such meanings of words are fixed in dictionaries.
Each dictionary entry correlates the sound envelope of a word with the subject or phenomenon that it denotes. The lexical meaning of the totality of the features of the word calls the most basic, those that are considered as meaningful.
A word cannot be without meaning. And here it is necessary to say about such a phenomenon in the Russian language: some words have one meaning (for example, bandage, analgin, trolleybus, noun, etc.), and some have several (for example, fire in the oven and in the shower , sleeve shirt and river, etc.).
There are quite a lot of unambiguous words in the Russian language, usually these are terms, names of animals, plants or the name of some profession. For example, syntax, roe deer, birch, neuropathologist. If everything is clear with this group, then the second can cause some difficulties in determining: here we need to talk about two terms that differ from each other. These are homonyms and ambiguous words.
Words that have one meaning allow us to build our speech clearly and clearly. The situation with the other group is more complicated: their meaning can only be understood from the context.
Examples of homonyms and polysemantic words with careful study show the main differences between these groups from each other.
Ambiguous words
When we pronounce a certain sound set with which several objects or phenomena of reality are associated in our consciousness, we are dealing with a multi-valued word.
For example, with the word "star" you can imagine a star in the sky, a star of show business, a starfish.
Ambiguous words in the Russian language are not uncommon. These are the most common , commonly used words. They can have many meanings. So, for example, the word “go” in Ozhegov’s dictionary has twenty-six meanings. Among them are: time is running (passing), hours are running (showing time), rain is falling (dripping), a person is walking (moving), a coat is walking (coming to face), etc.
The meanings of a multi-valued word have a common component. For example, this is the “direction” of the word “road”: asphalt road, road to the house, road of life, travel.
All meanings of a multi-valued word are divided into two groups: the first is the main direct, and the derivatives are figurative. The second is the result of transferring the sound-alphabetic cover of the word to another subject by some criterion. For example, the word “hat” means “headgear” and “part of the mushroom”, a common sign of “round field”.
As a result of such a transfer, a metaphor and metonymy can turn out. A metaphor is a transfer based on similarities: in form (call button); by color (gray clouds); location (tail of the aircraft), by function (visor). Metonymy paints an emotional picture (a storm of applause is a loud applause; living in a hole is bad).
Now let's see how the ambiguous words differ from homonyms.
Homonyms
This is another group of words in Russian. They have similarities in spelling and pronunciation, but mean completely different things. For example, a braid - a female hairstyle and an agricultural tool, glasses - a device for improving vision and an account in the game.
Thus, similarity on some basis is what distinguishes ambiguous words from homonyms.
Types of homonyms
Homonyms are divided into the following types:
- homographs are words written in the same way, but pronounced differently; for example, "castle" - "castle";
- homophones - are heard the same way, but are written differently; for example, "raft" - "fruit";
- omoforms are words that coincide in some grammatical form; for example, glass is a noun and a past tense verb.
Differences
The contemporary poet Alexander Kushner has a poem “We and the Foreigner Bill”, which clearly shows homonyms and ambiguous words: the differences between the two groups are very visible.
We on the Neva admired walruses,
How they swam, squeezed by ice.
A foreigner named Bill
He was with us and surprised everyone:
“You say it’s a walrus walrus,
Why is she wearing a hat like a swimmer? ”...
“It's a pity,” I said, “that Muscovites are in the final
Points were taken from Leningraders. ”
A foreigner named Bill
He was with us and surprised everyone:
“Give,” said, “to get to New York,
I will send points to my dear Leningraders. ”
Ambiguous words refer to objects that have a similar attribute. The word walrus is significant in this poem - a large northern marine animal and a lover of winter swimming. The general semantic part that combines these values is the ability to swim in ice water.
A foreigner named Bill did not understand the meaning of the word glasses . He thought it was a subject for improving vision, and the poem talks about the score in a sports game. There are no similarities between the lexical meanings of these words. These are homonyms.
Dictionaries can be used to distinguish these terms. In them, with the help of special notes, it is shown which words are ambiguous and which are homonyms.
Reasons for the emergence of homonyms
Linguists explain the reasons for the appearance of homonyms in the Russian language.
- Borrowing leads to the fact that a foreign word may coincide in spelling and sound. For example, the German word “marriage” (lack), appearing in our language, coincided with the Russian “marriage” (family relations).
- When word formation using the tools available in the language (roots and affixes), the same words also appear. For example, the word "hillfort" with the meaning "place of an ancient settlement" coincided with the later formed identical, but with the meaning of "huge city".
- There is a change in the native Russian words under the influence of processes operating in the language. For example, the word "bow", which had the meaning of "ancient weapons", has acquired a new meaning "garden plant".
- The collapse of a polysemantic word also leads to the appearance of homonyms. So the word "light" in the meaning of "the universe, the world" acquired a new "dawn, morning."
Knowing the processes that occur in the language, you can understand the difference between polysemantic words from homonyms.