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Homonymy
Homophony Homography
tale : tail lead : lead
[e
I
]
[e
I
] [e] [i:]
Figure 2.3 Homonymy Division into Homophony and Homography
3. Polysemy
The term polysemy was popularized by Bréal which later called as the father of polysemy in 1887 Nerlich, 2003. In her research on polysemy related
to period of time, Nerlich remarks some important development of polysemy from the past until present. The root of the idea of polysemy is from Greek philosophy
from Plato and Democritus that offered polysemy as an argument which has the meaning as
‘many meanings’. However, the starting point of the new studies of polysemy are the term
“polysémie” which proposed by Bréal and also his research on polysemy.
a. Definition of Polysemy
This study will focus on polysemy phenomenon in which one word may have several meanings. A word is polysemous, or manifest polysemy Cruse,
1986; Napoli, 1996, if that single word has several related meanings Akmaijan, Richard, Demer, Farmer Harnish, 2001; Saeed, 2001; Klepousniotou, 2002;
Fasold, 2006; O’Grady Archibald, 2010; Riemer, 2010; Goddard, 2011. Some other researchers Fromkin, Rodman Hyams, 2003; Davies Elder, 2006;
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Koskela Murphy, 2006 add the feature of distinguishable meanings into the definition. Lyons 1995, and Leacock and Ravin 2000 define polysemy in a
shorter phrase as the multiplicity of the word meanings. Polysemy can have close or distant meanings Carter, 2000.
An example of a polysemous word is the word chip which can mean ‘a
piece of wood ’, ‘a chip of potato’, or ‘a chip of computer circuit’. The meanings
share relatedness as a small piece thing. Other examples by O’Grady and
Archibald 2010 are shown in the Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Some Polysemy in English
O’Grady and Archibald also give examples of polysemous word in sentences.
1. A visible trace or impression on something The tires left a mark on the road
2. A written or printed symbol You need a punctuation mark here
3. A grade, as in school He got a good mark on the math test
4. A target She hit the mark every time
5. An indication of some quality or property The mark of a good diplomat is the
ability to negotiate p. 206. Goddard 2011 shows the example of a couple words that do not qualify
as polysemy because “they belong to different part-of-speech categories” p.20.
Word Meaning a
Meaning b
bright shining
intelligent to glare
to shine intensely to stare angrily
a deposit minerals in the earth
money in the bank
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The examples are the word table
1
as a noun as in, on the table and table
2
as a verb as in,
Don’t table that document. Therefore, a polysemous word has a property as having single syntactic function part-of-speech.
b. Polysemy and Homonymy
