2. Definition
Polysemy refers to the situation where
the same word has two or more different
meaning, In Addition Polysemy is the
association of one word with two or more
distinct meanings. A polyseme is a word
or phrase with multiple meanings.
3. Problems inherent
Despite its apparent simplicity, the concept of
polysemy is complex and involves a certain
number of problems. We shall consider in turn
the number of meanings, transference of
meaning and difficulty in recognizing polysemy.
6. Definition
Homonymy is the relation between
words with identical forms but
different meanings. In addition, In
linguistics, a homonym is one of a
group of words that share the
same pronunciation but have
different meanings.
7. Example
1)The pair stalk (part of a plant)
and stalk (follow/harass a
person)
2)The pair left (past tense of
leave) and left (opposite of
right).
10. The Lexeme or Lexical Item
Is a ‘unit of lexical meaning, which exists
regardless of any inflectional endings it may have
or the number of words it may contain’ It is basic
unit the meaning and the headwords of the
dictionary are all lexemes
11. More Clearly
A lexeme is the smallest or
minimal unit of lexicon in a
language that bears some
“meaning”
12. Technically
A lexeme is an abstract unit of
morphological analysis in
linguistics, that roughly
corresponds to a set of forms
taken by a single word.
13. Technically
For example, in the
terminology language, run,
runs, ran and running are
forms of the same lexeme,
conventionally written as
run.
14. Morphological Form
A lexeme has a morphological form,
semantic content (or meaning) and a
syntactic category.
15. Morphological Form
For Example
the lexeme PLAY can take up many forms like play, playing,
plays, and played. All of these word forms have the same
basic meaning (which is denoted by an action) and, hence,
will be categorised under the same lexeme. The word playing
is the participle form of the verb that is used to denote the
same action in continuous aspect.
16. Lexeme is not
Lexeme is not equivalent to a word or morpheme in a
language. Sometimes, one lexeme can be formed of more
than one word and morpheme also. For example, the
lexemes like take off and put up with consist of two and three
words respectively. The meaning of these lexemes can be
determined by taking the constituents together, and not from
the individual words taken separately.
