f two or perhaps even more homonyms? Similarly, charge, in charge the gun, charge the man with theft, charge somebody a stiff price can be viewed in several ways.the synchronic level, when the difference in etymology is irrelevant, the problem of establishing the criterion for the distinction between different words identical in sound form, and different meanings of the same word becomes hard to solve. The semantic criterion which ultimately is reduced to distinguishing between words that "have nothing in common semantically" and those that "have something in common" and therefore must be taken as one lexical unit, is very vague and hopelessly subjective. Nevertheless the problem cannot be dropped altogether as upon an efficient arrangement of dictionary entries depends on the amount of time spent by the readers in looking up a word: a lexicographer will either save or waste his readers 'time and effort.solutions differ. It is a widely used in English lexicography to combine in one entry words of identical phonetic form showing similarity of lexical meaning or, in other words, revealing a lexical invariant, even if they belong to different parts of speech. In post-war lexicography in our country a different trend has settled. The Anglo-Russian dictionary edited by V. D. Arakin makes nine separate entries with the word right against four items given in the dictionary edited by Hornby. The necessary restriction is that different sources must be traced within the history of the language. Words that coincided phonetically before they penetrated into the English vocabulary are not taken into account. The etymological criterion, however, may very often lead to distortion of the dissent-day situation. The English vocabulary of to-day is not a replica of the Old English vocabulary with some additions from borrowing. It is in many respects a different system, and this system will not be revealed if the lexicographer is guided by etymological criteria only. A more or less simple, if not very rigorous, procedure based on purely synchronic data may be prompted by transformational analysis. It may be called explanatory transformation. It is based on the assumption that if different senses rendered by the same phonetic complex can be defined with the help of an identical kernel word-group, they may be considered sufficiently near to be regarded as variants of the same word; if not, they are homonyms.the following set of examples:
. A child's voice is heard. 2. His voice ... was ... annoyingly well-bred.
. The voice-voicelessness distinction ... sets up some English consonants in opposed pairs ...
. In the voice contrast of active and passive ... the active is the unmarked form.first variant (voice 1 may be defined as 'sounds uttered in speaking or singing as characteristic of a particular p...
