A course In Modern English Lexicology

§ 32. Homonymy of Words
monymy we find that some words are ho-
and Homonymy of Word-Forms
monymous in all their forms, i.e. we observe f u l l homonymy of the paradigms of two or more different words, e.g., in seal1 — ‘a sea animal’
and seal2 — ‘a design printed on paper by means of a stamp’. The paradigm “seal, seal’s, seals, seals’ ” is identical for both of them and gives no indication of whether it is seal1 or seal2, that we are analysing. In other cases, e.g. seal1 — ‘a sea animal’ and (to) seal, — ‘to close tightly’, we see that although some individual word- forms are homonymous, the whole of the paradigm is not identical. Compare, for instance, the paradigms: seal1
(to) seal3
seal
seal
seal’s
seals
seals
sealed
seals’
sealing, etc.
It is easily observed that only some of the word-forms (e.g. seal, seals, etc.) are homonymous, whereas others (e.g. sealed, sealing) are not. In such cases we cannot speak of homonymous words but only of 1 Not only words but other linguistic units may be homonymous. Here, however, we are concerned with the homonymy of words and word-forms only, so we shall not touch upon the problem of homonymous affixes or homonymous phrases.
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homonymy of individual word-forms or of p a r t i a l h o m o n y m y .
This is true of a number of other cases, e.g. compare find [faind], found
[faund], found [faund], and found [faund], founded ['faundid], founded
['faundid]; know [nou], knows [nouz], knew [nju:], and no [nou]; nose
[nouz], noses ['nouzis]; new [nju:] in which partial homonymy is observed.
Consequently all cases of homonymy may be
§ 33. Classification
of Homonyms classified into full and partial homonymy —
i.e. homonymy of words and homonymy of individual word-forms.
The bulk of full homonyms are to be found within the same parts of speech (e.g. seal1 n — seal2 n), partial homonymy as a rule is observed in word-forms belonging to different parts of speech (e.g. seal1 n — seal3 v).
This is not to say that partial homonymy is impossible within one part of speech. For instance in the case of the two verbs — lie [lai] — ‘to be in a horizontal or resting position’ and He [lai] — ‘to make an untrue statement' — we also find partial homonymy as only two word-forms [lai],
[laiz] are homonymous, all other forms of the two verbs are different.
Cases of full homonymy may be found in different parts of speech too; e.g. for [fo:] — preposition, for [fo:] — conjunction and four [fo:] —
numeral, as these parts of speech have no other word-forms.
Homonyms may be also classified by the type of meaning into lexical, lexico-grammatical and grammatical homonyms. In seal1 n and seal2 n, e.g., the part-of-speech meaning of the word and the grammatical meanings of all its forms are identical (cf. seal [si:l] Common Case Singular, seal’s [si:lz] Possessive Case Singular for both seal1 and seal2). The difference is confined to the lexical meaning only: seal1 denotes ‘a sea animal’, ‘the fur of this animal’, etc., seal2 — ‘a design printed on paper, the stamp by which the design is made’, etc. So we can say that seal2 and seal1 are l e x i c a l h o m o n y m s because they differ in lexical meaning.
If we compare seal1 — ‘a sea animal’, and (to) seal3 — ‘to close tightly, we shall observe not only a difference in the lexical meaning of their homonymous word-forms but a difference in their grammatical meanings as well. Identical sound-forms, i.e. seals [si:lz] (Common Case Plural of the noun) and (he) seals [si:lz] (third person Singular of the verb) possess each of them different grammatical meanings. As both grammatical and lexical meanings differ we describe these homonymous word-forms as l e x i c o - g r a m m a t i c a l .
Lexico-grammatical homonymy generally implies that the homonyms in question belong to different parts of speech as the part-of-speech meaning is a blend of the lexical and grammatical semantic components. There may be cases however when lexico-grammatical homonymy is observed within the same part of speech, e.g., in the verbs (to) find [faind] and (to) found [faund], where the homonymic word-forms: found [faund] — Past Tense of (to) find and found [faund] — Present Tense of (to) found differ both grammatically and lexically.
Modern English abounds in homonymic word-forms differing in grammatical meaning only. In the paradigms of the majority of verbs the form of the Past Tense is homonymous with the form of Participle II, e.g.
asked [a:skt] — asked [a:skt]; in the paradigm of nouns we usually 40
find homonymous forms of the Possessive Case Singular and the Common Case Plural, e.g. brother’s ['br0Dqz] — brothers ['br0Dqz]. It may be easily observed that g r a m m a t i c a l h o m o n y m y is the homonymy of different word-forms of one and the same word.
The two classifications: f u l l and p a r t i a l h o m o n y m y and l e x i c a l ,
l e x i c o - g r a m m a t i c a l
and
g r a m m a t i c a l
h o m o n y m y are not mutually exclusive. All homonyms may be described on the basis of the two criteria — homonymy of all forms of the word or only some of the word-forms and also by the type of meaning in which homonymous words or word-forms differ. So we speak of the full lexical homonymy of sea1 n and seal2 n, of the partial lexical homonymy of lie1 v and lie2 v, and of the partial lexico-grammatical homonymy of seal1 n and seal3 v.
It should be pointed out that in the classifica-