Practical usage of polysemy in teaching English on intermediate level

Most of the problems in linguistic science are intimately bound to question of semasiology and call for scientific analysis of communication in words.

Theoretical problems of linguistic form and meaning as relevant to the progressive development of language have attracted the attention of scholars, philosophers and grammarians since the times of Plato and Aristotle. From those times sameness of meaning was not very easy to deal with but there seemed nothing inherently difficult about difference of meaning. The situation is the same nowadays. Not only different words have different meanings; it’s also the case that the same word may have a set of meanings. This phenomenon is called polysemy.

Polysemy is the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase. Most words of the English language are polysemantic. Highly developed polysemy is one of the characteristic features of the English language. The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops gradually, mostly over the centuries, as more and more new meanings are either added to old ones, or out some of them. We say that the word is polysemantic when it has many meanings.

In the word the main and the secondary meanings are distinguished. Thus, the word is polysemantic in the language but in actual speech it is always monosemantic, that is, it has only one meaning. It is in the context that makes the polysemantic word monosemantic. The researches of polysemy are also significant in grammar, as most grammatical forms are polysemantic. Even a single grammatical form can be made to express a whole variety of structural meanings.

The semantic structure of a polysemantic word is treated as a system of meanings. Some semantic structures are arranged on a different principle. In the following list of meaning of the adjective dull one can hardly hope to find a generalized meaning covering and holding together the rest of the semantic structure.

Practicing polysemy is distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely related meanings (head: of a person, of a pin, of an organization). In my opinion the most important aspect of vocabulary teaching for intermediate learners is to foster learner independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Therefore guided discovery, contextual guesswork and using dictionaries should be the main ways to deal with discovering meaning. Teachers can help students with specific techniques and practice in contextual guesswork, for example, the understanding of discourse markers and identifying the function of the word in the sentence.

In my opinion the most important aspect of teaching polysemy for learners is to foster independence so that learners will be able to deal with new lexis and expand their vocabulary beyond the end of the course. Therefore guided discovery, contextual guesswork should be the main ways to deal with discovering meaning.

Intermediate level includes the 13-16 years old pupils. They already have some basic knowledge in studying a foreign language. If pupils have had good achievements in language learning, they are usually interested in the subject and work willingly both in class and at home. The desire to learn depends fully on the teacher’s ability to involve each pupil in language activities during the lesson.

Pupils give preferences to those exercises which require thinking [1].

Exercise:

• 1.    Give all the meanings you know to the following verbs, illustrating them with examples: to get; to go; to bring; to make; to do; to let; to buy; to begin; to feel.

• 2.    The noun leg has several meanings:

• 1)    one of the long parts of your body that your feet are joined to;

2)one of the series of games in a football competition played between two teams;

• 3)    one of the upright parts that support a piece of furniture;

Match the meanings of the word face with the sentences given below:

• 1)    Here, pull up your pant legs and let me see if your knees are hurt.

• 2)    The legs of my jeans were covered in mud.

• 3)    Leeds will have to win the second leg if they are to go forward to the finals.

• 3.    Define the meaning of the noun head as used in the sentences below. How many different meanings did you find?

• 1)    Collins suffered severe head injuries in the accident.

• 2)    He turned his head to kiss her.

• 3)    I picked up a hammer and hit the head of the nail as hard as I could.

• 4)    People going out in conditions like this need their heads

• 4.    How many meaning of the following words do you know? Name them: head, bench, to feel, to dress, hand, leg, power.

• 5.    Match the idiomatic expressions of the noun head with their meaning.

examined.

• a)    to discuss a difficult problem together;

• b)    to be too difficult for someone to understand;

• c)    to manage to continue to live on your income or keep your business working when this is difficult because of financial problems;

• d)    to be much better than other people;

• e)    to show pride or confidence, especially in a difficult situation;

• f)    to make people think about something in the opposite way to the way

it was originally intended;

• g)    to give someone the freedom to do what they want to do;

• h)    used to say that someone will be punished severely for something that has happened;

• i)    used to warn people that something is falling from above.

Language tends to change in time and space. These universal characteristics of language are permanent interest of scholarship. The most important function of any language is to carry the meaning. But as we know not only the sound-form but also the meaning of the word is changed in the course of historical development of a language. It happened under the influence of many factors. Change of meaning is affected through association between the existing meaning and the new one. This association is generally based on the similarity or the contiguity of meanings. Due to numeral changes of meaning such a phenomenon as multiplicity of word meanings or polysemy appeared.

Polysemy is characteristic of most words in many languages. All the lexical and lexico-grammatical variants of the word taken together form its semantic structure or semantic paradigm. The phenomenon of polysemy was broadly investigated in the historical development of the language. The word “polysemy” comes from Latin, but the roots of the concept of polysemy lie in Greek philosophy.

Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and concepts as every object and every notion has many features and a concept reflected in a word always contains a generalisation of several traits of the object. Some of these traits or components of meaning are common with other objects. Hence the possibility of using the same name in secondary nomination for objects possessing common features which are sometimes only implied in the original meaning. A word when acquiring new meaning or meanings may also retain, and most often retains the previous meaning.

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