ON THE QUESTION OF CLASSIFICATION OF HOMONYMS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The article deals with classification of homonyms of the English language. A review of scientific works on classification of homonyms is carried out. There are few works in research on the homonymy of the English language where this phenomenon is defined and studied sufficiently. Researchers proceed from the traditional understanding of homonyms, when the sound side coincides, these phenomena are called homophones, when they coincide in writing, they are considered homographs. It is noted that in the English language, a significant part of verbal word forms are homonymous. And almost all nouns have homonymous word forms, but nevertheless, due to limited grammatical affixation, when the sound of individual isolated word forms coincides, homonymy covers only a small percentage of all forms of matched words. The vocabulary of the language reacts sensitively to all the changes taking place in the public life of the people. The appearance of a new meaning of a word, the diverse changes in existing meanings, the archaization of certain old meanings convincingly prove the existence of a close connection between language and society. Numerous cases of the formation of a new word-homonym, the transition of a polysemous word into homonyms, the splitting of a polysemous word into homonyms, the emergence of non-heterogeneous homonyms-these and other numerous phenomena make it difficult to determine homonymy.