Synonyms, paronyms, antonyms, homonyms - these words, familiar to everyone since school, probably caused difficulties in learning. The difficulty in remembering these terms and their essence arises not only among schoolchildren. For the uselessness of use, to get confused in what is what, adults can also. Let's talk about homonyms. In the most general sense, these are words that sound the same, that is, they have the same pronunciation. But not so simple. Consider the concept of homonymy in more detail.
Speaking about homonyms in general, we can conclude that homonyms are words that have completely different meanings, although they coincide in sound or spelling. But this does not end with homonymy. Researchers have a different understanding of homonymy due to a discrepancy in the question of what a linguistic form is. Some linguists see it as an exclusively sound wrapper, while others include linguistic form and spelling in the concept. Therefore, there are various classifications of homonyms.
According to conventional wisdom and classification, homonyms are the common name for homographs, homophones and absolute homonyms. Homophones are words that are read the same, well, or almost the same, but are written in different ways, that is, they have different graphic forms with the same phonetic. Homonyms
English clearly illustrate this. For instance,
bear / bare. Although these words are pronounced the same way, they have different meanings - bear / grin, expose.
Read / red - read / red - [red - red].
In contrast, homographs are written the same way and read differently. For example, even the form of one verb read in the present and past tense
read / read - [ri: d - red] may be a homograph.
The homonymy of the English language affects not only parts of speech, but also morphemes, for example, ending -ing of long times and gerund forms.
Absolute homonyms, in turn, differ in semantic meaning and part-part affiliation. For example, three identical words
match / match / match mean fit - fit, contest - competition, person - suitable person, second half, team member.
Linguists divide homonyms into full and partial ones. Complete homonyms are called that coincide throughout the paradigm, in other words, they are the same in all forms of the word. Partial can only coincide in certain forms of words. Quoting V. Vinogradov, we can say that partial homonyms are more a feature characteristic of the so-called inflectional languages (i.e., languages in which words are formed using endings, or inflections). But in English, this linguistic phenomenon is also not uncommon.
There is another classification of homonyms. In accordance with it, grammatical, lexical and lexical-grammatical types of homonyms are distinguished. Lexical
homonyms differ in meaning, that is, lexically, although grammatically they are the same. For instance,
- light / light, physical phenomenon and the world;
- boxer / boxer, dog breed and boxing athlete;
- pen / pen, door handle and pen for writing.
Grammar homonyms, although they have a semantic (semantic) community, are different parts of speech. For example, english words
mere (n.) is a small lake, and mere (adv.) is nothing more than just grammatical homonyms.
Lexical and grammatical homonyms are words that coincide in spelling, but are different in sound and in meaning. For example, then / then - vernac. then TV. p. (by whom? what?) then (Im. p. sweat).