Introduction
In contrast to the notion of sense relations, polysemy and homonymy refer to
similarities rather than differences between meanings. A word is polysemous when
it has more than one meaning (e.g. plain). Words that have the same written or
spoken form but different meanings are called homonyms (e.g. bank).
Homophones have the same pronunciation but different meanings (e.g. plain -
plane), whereas words that are spelled the same but have different meanings are
referred to as homographs (e.g. dove). Very often, the distinction between
polysemy and homonymy cannot be drawn precisely. A criterion for distinguishing
polysemous and homonymic expressions is a historical or conceptual relationship
between the words: Words that have the same historical origin or are related
conceptually are said to be polysemous.
Polysemes
A polyseme is a word or phrase with different, but related senses. Since the test for
polysemy is the vague concept of the relatedness, judgments of polysemy can be
difficult to make. Because applying pre-existing words to new situations is a
natural process of language change, looking at words' etymology is helpful in
determining polysemy but not the only solution; as words become lost in
etymology, what once was a useful distinction of meaning may no longer be so.
Some apparently unrelated words share a common historical origin, however, so
etymology is not an infallible test for polysemy, and dictionary writers also often
defer to speakers' intuitions to judge polysemy in cases where it contradicts
etymology. English has many polysemous words. For example, the verb "to get"
can mean "procure" (I'll get the drinks), "become" (she got scared), "understand" (I
get it) etc.
There are several tests for polysemy, but one of them is zeugma: if one word seems
to exhibit zeugma when applied in different contexts, it is likely that the contexts
bring out different polysemes of the same word. If the two senses of the same word
do not seem to fit, yet seem related, then it is likely that they are polysemous. The
fact that this test again depends on speakers' judgments about relatedness, however,
means that this test for polysemy is not infallible, but is rather merely a helpful
conceptual aid.
1
1. I went walking this morning
2. We went for a walk last Sunday
3. Do you walk the dog every day?
4. I live near Meadow Walk Drive
5. The wardrobe is too heavy to lift; we’ll have to walk it into the bedroom
(move a large object by rocking).
6. She walks the tower (to haunt a place as a ghost).
7. The workers threatened to walk (to go on strike).
8. Walk with God! (to live your life in a particular way)
Homonymy
In linguistics, homonyms, broadly defined, are words which are homographs
(words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation) or homophones
(words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. For
example, according to this definition, the words row (propel with oars), row
(argument) and row (a linear arrangement) are homonyms, as are the words see
(vision) and sea (body of water).
A more restrictive or technical definition sees homonyms as words that are
simultaneously homographs and homophones that is to say they have identical
pronunciation and spelling, whilst maintaining different meanings. Examples are
the pair stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/harass a person) and the pair left
(past tense of leave) and left (opposite of right).
Examples include the following nouns, verbs and adjectives:
1. Fleet: all the ships of a nation’s navy, e.g., The Greek fleet disappeared
behind the huge mountains.
2. Fleet: a number of road vehicles, boats, or aircraft owned, working, or
managed as a unit, usually by a commercial enterprise e.g., The new
company has a large fleet of service vehicles.
3. Plane, e.g., I like to travel by airplane.
4. Plain, pronounced the same but spelt differently, means clearly visible, e.g.,
The wallet was in plain view.
5. Sow, the verb, means to plant seeds, e.g., He sowed the seeds of revolution.
6. Sow, the noun, refers to an adult female pig, e.g., Have you fed the sow?
2
7. Bank, the noun, means a business offering financial services, e. g., He went
to the bank to deposit some money.
8. Bank, the noun, refers to the steep side of a river, stream, lake, or canal, e.g.,
We climbed the river bank safely.
9. Bank, the noun, also refers row of similar things, e.g., There was a bankof
switches on the wall.
Main Difference – Polysemy vs Homonymy
Polysemy and Homonymy are two similar concepts in linguistics. Both of them
refer to words having multiple meanings. Polysemy refers to the coexistence of
many possible meanings for a word or phrase. Homonymy refers to the existence
of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different
meanings and origins. This is the main difference between polysemy and
homonymy.
The difference between homonyms and polysemes is subtle. Lexicographers define
polysemes within a single dictionary lemma, numbering different meanings, while
homonyms are treated in separate lemmata. Semantic shift can separate a
polysemous word into separate homonyms. For example, check as in "bank check"
(or Cheque), check in chess, and check meaning "verification" are considered
homonyms, while they originated as a single word derived from chess in the 14th
century. Psycholinguistic experiments have shown that homonyms and polysemes
are represented differently within people's mental lexicon: while the different
meanings of homonyms (which are semantically unrelated) tend to interfere or
compete with each other during comprehension, this does not usually occur for the
polysemes that have semantically related meanings. Results for this contention,
however, have been mixed.
