Лекции по лексикологии английского языка. Гусева Г.В. - 33 стр.

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Undergraduates‘ informal speech abounds in words of the type. exam, lab,

prof, vac. hol, co-ed (a girl student at a coeducational school or college).

Lecture 9

Polysemy. Homonymy

I. Polysemy

The word polysemy means plurality of meanings. It exists only in the

language, not in speech. A word which has more than one meaning is called

polysemantic.

There are two processes of the semantic development of a word: radiation

and concatenation. In cases of radiation the primary meaning stands in the centre

and the secondary meanings proceed out of it like rays. Each secondary meaning

can be traced to the primary meaning, e.g. face (the front part of the human head -

the primary meaning; the front part of a building, the front part of a watch, the

front part of a playing card; expression of the face, outward appearance -

secondary meanings).

In cases of concatenation secondary meanings of a word develop like a

chain, e.g. crust – 1. hard outer part of bread, 2. hard part of anything (a pie, a

cake), 3. harder layer over soft snow, 4. sullen gloomy person, 5. impudence. Here

the last meanings have nothing to do with primary ones. In such cases homonyms

appeare in the language. This phenomenon is called the split of polysemy.

II. Semantic Structure of Polysemantic Words

Synchronically, the problem of polysemy ie the problem of interrelation and

interdependence of different meanings of the same word. The semantic structure of