Р е ф е р а т homonyms in the English language Знобищева Мария Сергеевна ученица «Г» класса Головко Ольга Владимировна Тамбов 2013 Lyceum 29 Report Homonyms in the English language Znobishcheva Masha g teacher: Golovko O

1.2. The main items of the work

All languages have homonyms – words which are identical in sound and spelling, or, at least in one of these aspects, but different in their meanings. And their meaning is usually determined by the context in which they appear. English vocabulary is rich in such pairs and even groups of words. Their identical forms are mostly accidental.

If synonyms and antonyms can be regarded as the treasury of the language’s expressive resources, homonyms are of no interest in this respect, and one cannot expect them to be of particular value for communication.

There are a lot of sources of homonyms; they are phonetic changes, borrowing, conversion, shortening, words which were made by sound–imitation etc. And the sources of homonyms described above have one important feature in common. In all the mentioned cases the homonyms developed from two or more different words, and their similarity is purely accidental.

It is worth saying that there are a lot of subdivisions of homonyms, for example: homonyms proper, homophones and homographs. But Professor Smirnitsky gives more detailed classification of homonyms. According to it, there are two large classes: full homonyms and partial homonyms. All classifications have its advantages and disadvantages and because of this all classifications are necessary and important for language studying.

The study of homonymy of a language has often been associated with the study of polysemy because distinction between the two has not been very clear. But to draw a line of distinction between the two types of words, we can apply various parameters. Therefore, we can distinguish polysemy from homonymy.