A Corpus-Based Study On The Differences Between Homonymy And Polysemy From The Lexical Priming Perspective

One word with multiple senses,which is a common phenomenon in English,can be subdivided into polysemy and homonymy according to the relatedness among senses.These two semantic terms have been studied broadly,however,seldom has a clear and specific manifestation concerning relatedness been mentioned in the previous research.Hence it has long been disturbing for scholars and English learners to differentiate polysemy from homonymy.Based on the lexical priming theory put forward by Hoey,this thesis aims to explore the distinctive priming features between homonyms and polysemes from three aspects: collocation,colligation and semantic association.This study covers the analysis on verbs and nouns of polysemy and homonymy,owing to their important roles in the field of words with multiple senses.According to Saeed's definition on polysemy and homonymy,four cases are chosen to be studied in this thesis,including adopt,accident,tend and race,among which the first pair of words belong to polysemy,whereas tend and race belong to homonymy.Moreover,senses of each word are identical in terms of part of speech,making sure of the accuracy for the results of this study.By searching these four words in Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),200 samples of each word are chosen randomly and classified according to their different senses.Through the combination of the corpus analysis tool AntConc3.2.1 and eyeball inspection,priming features of senses of the same word are compared,analyzed and concluded in terms of collocation,colligation and semantic association.Finally,verbs and nouns which belong to polysemy and homonymy are compared respectively to extract distinctive priming features between polysemes and homonyms,thus the final conclusion of this study can be drawn.After a series of comparison,three aspects are involved in the conclusion of this study.For the perspective of collocation,compared with homonymous senses,polysemous senses appear to be more identical concerning part of speech of collocates,collocation structures as well as categories of collocates.With regard to colligation,main grammatical structures of polysemous senses tend to be the same,while those of homonymous senses vary a lot.As for semantic association,semantic preference and semantic prosody are involved.On one hand,collocates of polysemous senses prefer to be involved in different dimensions of the same semantic field,whereas the semantic distribution for collocates of homonymous senses are irrelevant.On the other hand,polysemous senses share the same type of semantic prosody to a large extent,yet certain distinctions of semantic prosody exist among homonymous senses,appearing to be randomly distributed.This study enables English learners to have a deeper understanding of the distinctive features between polysemy and homonymy,leading them to the essence of these two terms.Besides,the research design of this study poses a good example for research within lexicology.