Homonyms and Polysemy. Problems of translation

Homonyms and Polysemy. Problems of translation.

The meaning of polysemy

It is a morphological process which occurs when a word has two or more related meanings. If a word has two senses of the word which meanings are related, the word is judge to be polysemous. In another word, a single lexeme has two or more similar meanings.
A word is polysemous if it can be used to express different meanings. The difference between the meanings can be obvious or subtle.

The meaning of Homonymy

• It is a morphological process where a word has two or more different meanings. In other words, it used to refer to lexemes that share the same pronunciation and the same spelling, but they have different meaning.

Two or more words are homonyms if they either sound the same (homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings.
• In other words, if you hear (or read) two words that sound (or are written) the same but are not identical in meaning, you need to decide if it’s really two words (homonyms), or if it is one word used in two different ways (polysemy).
Homonyms are words that have multiple meanings that are spelled the same. They can make translation difficult depending on how they are used or placed in a sentence. For example: I left his glove on the left side of the bench.
A clear case of homonymy 1: The word down in sentence (1-a) and the word down in sentence (1-b). These are two words that happen to share sound and spelling. There is no relation between them:

• a. Sarah climbed down the ladder.
• b. Sarah bought a down blanket.

A clear case of polysemy 2: The word Good in the following two examples. In one case it’s a moral judgement, in the other case it’s a judgement of skill.
a. John was a good man. He donated a lot of money to charity. b. Bill was a good painter. His drawings always were exciting
to look at.

Polysemy

• bright: shining, intelligent
• Head: of the body, the person at a top of a company
• run: flow, manage
• Open: honest, not covered, available

homonymy

• Right-write
• Night-knight
• Sea-see
• Son-sun
• Deer-dear

Thank you for attention!!!