fy"> arms (v.) 'Supplies with weapons'. In summing up this dichromatic analysis of homonymy it should be emphasized that there are two ways by which homonyms come into being, namely convergent development of sound form and divergent development of meaning (see table below). The first may consist in:
(a) phonetic change only,
(b) phonetic change combined with loss of affixes,
(e) independent formationhomonymous bases by means of homonymous morphemes. The second, that is divergent development of meaning may be
(a) limited within one lexico-grammatical class of words,
(b) combined with difference in lexico-grammatical class and therefore difference in grammatical functions and distribution,
(c) based on independent formation from the same base by homonymous morphemes.process can sometimes be more complicated. At dissent there are at least two homonyms: stick (noun1) - 'insert pointed things into', a highly polysemantic word, and the no less polysemantic stick (noun) 'a rod'. the course of time the number of homonyms on the whole increases, although occasionally the conflict of homonyms ends in word loss.
2.3 Practical approach in studying homonyms
The synchronic treatment of English homonyms brings to the forefront a set of problems of paramount importance for different branches of applied linguistics: lexicography, foreign language teaching and machine translation. These problems are: the criteria distinguishing homonymy from polysemy, the formulation of rules for recognizing different meanings of the same homonym in terms of distribution, and the description of difference between patterned and irregular homonymy. It is necessary to emphasize that all these problems are connected with difficulties created by homonymy in understanding the message by the reader or listener, not with formulating one's thoughts; they exist for the speaker only in so far as he must construct his speech in a way that would divert all possible misunderstanding.three problems are so closely interwoven that it is difficult to separate them. So we shall discuss them as they appear for various practical purposes. For a lexicographer it is a problem of establishing word boundaries. It is easy enough to see that match, as in safety matches, is a separate word from the verb match 'to suit'. But he must know whether he is justified in taking into one entry match, as in football match, and match in meet one's match 'one's equal'. Can the English verb bear in bear a burden, bear troubles, bear fruit, bear offspring be viewed as a single word or as a set o...
