Homophony, homonymy and polysemy
There are three other, less well-known terms which are often used to describe relationships among words in a language. The first of these is homophony. When two or more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation, they are described as homophones. Some examples are bare -bear, meal-meet, flour - flower, pail - pale, sew-so.
The term homonymy is used when one form (written and spoken) has two or more unrelated meanings. Examples of homonyms are the pairs bank (of a river) - bank (financial institution), bat (flying creature) - bat (used in sports), race (contest of speed) - race (ethnic group), pupil (at school) - pupil (in the eye) and mole (on skin) - mole (small animal). The temptation is to think that the two types of “bank” must be related in meaning. They are not. Homonyms are words which have quite separate meanings, but which have accidentally come to have exactly the same form.
Relatedness of meaning accompanying identical forms is technically known as polysemy, which can be defined as one form (written or spoken) having multiple meanings which are all related by extension. Examples are the word head, used to refer to the object on top of your body, on top of a glass of beer, on top of a company or department; or foot (of person, of bed, of mountain), or run (person does, water does, colors do).
The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is not always clear cut. However, one indication of the distinction can be found in the typical dictionary entry for words. If a word has multiple meanings (polysemic), then there will be a single entry, with a numbered list of the different meanings of the word. If two words are treated as homonyms, they will typically have two separate entries. You could check in your dictionary and probably find that the different meanings of words like head, get, run, face and foot are treated as examples of polysemy, whereas mail, bank, sole and mole are treated as examples of homonymy.
Of course, one form can be distinguished via homonymy, then shown to have various uses via polysemy. The words date (= oblong, fleshy fruit) and date (= point in time) are homonyms. But the 'point in time' kind of date is polysemous in terms of a particular day and month (= on a letter), an arranged meeting time (= an appointment), a social meeting (= with someone of the opposite sex) and even a person (= that someone of the opposite sex). The question How about a date? could have many interpretations.
These last three lexical relations are, of course, the basis of a lot of word-play, particularly used for humorous effect. In the nursery rhyme, Mary had a little lamb, we think of a small animal, but in the comic version of Mary had a little lamb, some rice and vegetables, we tend to think, instead, of a small amount of meat. The polysemy of lamb allows the two interpretations. The Pillsbury Flour Company once took advantage of homophony to promote a brand of flour with the slogan Everybody kneads it. If you are asked the following riddle: What's black and while and red all over?, you may initially be confused by the answer: a newspaper. The trick depends on the homophony of red and read. And if you have come across this riddle: Why are trees often mistaken for dogs?, then you will have encountered the use of homonymy in the answer: Because of their bark.
Metonymy
The relatedness of meaning found in polysemy is essentially based on similarity. The head of a company is similar to the head of a person on top of (and controlling) the body. There is another type of relationship between words, based simply on a close connection in everyday experience. That close connection can be based on a container-contents relation (bottle -coke: can -juice), a whole-part relation (cur - wheels; house - roof) or a representative-symbol relationship (king - crown; the President-she While House). These are examples of metonymy.
It is our familiarity with metonymy that makes He drank the whole bottle easy to understand, although it sounds absurd literally (i.e. he drank the liquid, not the glass object). We also accept The While House announced ... or Downing Street protested... without being puzzled that buildings appear to the talking. You use metonymy when you talk about filling up the car, having a roof over your head, answering the door, giving someone a hand, or needing some wheels. If you .see a mail delivery company called Spokes, you know, via metonymy, how they are making those deliveries (i.e. by bicycle).
Many examples of metonymy are highly conventionalized and easy to interpret. However, many others depend on an ability to infer what the speaker has in mind. The metonymy in Get your butt over here is easier to understand if you are used to male talk in the United States, the strings are too quiet if you're familiar with orchestral music, and I prefer cable, if you have a choice in how yon receive television programs (in the USA). Making sense of such expressions often depends on context, background knowledge and inference.
Collocation
One other distinct aspect of our knowledge of words has nothing to do with any of the factors considered so far. We know which words tend to occur with other words. If you ask a thousand people what they think of when you say hammer, more than half will say nail. If you say table, they'll mostly say chair and for butter - bread, for needle - thread, and for salt - pepper. One way we seem to organize our knowledge of words is simply in terms of collocation, or frequently occurring together.
Some collocations are joined pairs of words such as salt and pepper or husband and wife. However, salt will also make some people say water because of the common collocation salt water. And for many people in the USA, the word red elicits while and blue(the colors of the flag), it may be that part of knowing a language is knowing not only what words mean, but what their typical collocations are. Thus, part of your knowledge of fresh is as it occurs in the phrase fresh air, or knife in knife and fork or enough as in enough already. Okay, that's enough already!
Discourse analysis
There's two types of favors, the big favor and the small favor. You can measure the size of the favor by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to "Do me a favor." Small favor-small pause. "Can you do me a favor, hand me that pencil." No pause at all. Big favors are, "Could you do me a favor..." Eight seconds go by. "Yeah? What?"
"...well." The longer it takes them to get to it, the bigger the pain it's going to be.
Humans are the only species that do favors. Animals don't do favors. A lizard doesn't go up to a cockroach and say, "Could you do me a favor and hold still, I'd like to eat you alive." That's a big favor even with no pause. Jerry Seinfeld (1993)
In the study of language, some of the most interesting questions arise in connection with the way language is 'used', rather than what its components are. We have already introduced one of those questions when we discussed pragmatics in the preceding chapter. We were, in effect, asking how it is that language-users interpret what other language-users intend to convey. When we carry this investigation further and ask how it is that we, as language-users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation, we are undertaking what is known as discourse analysis.
When we concentrate on the description of a particular language we are normally concerned with the accurate representation of the forms and structures used in that language. However, as language-users, we are capable of more than simply recognizing correct versus incorrect form and structure. We can cope with fragments such as Trains collide, two die, a newspaper headline, and know, for example, that a causal relation exists between the two phrases. We can also make sense of notices like No shoes, no service, on shop windows in summer, understanding that a conditional relation exists between the two phrases ('If you are wearing no shoes, you will receive no service'). Moreover, we can encounter examples of texts, written n English, which appear to break a lot of the 'rules' of the English language, the following example, from an essay by a Saudi Arabian student learning English, contains all kinds of 'errors', yet it can be understood.
My Town
My natal was in a small town, very close to Riyadh capital of Saudi Arabia. The distant between my town and Riyadh 7 miles exactly. The name of this Almasani that means in English Factories. It takes this name from the people's career. In my childhood I remember the people live. It was very simple, most the people was farmer.
This example may serve to illustrate an interesting point about the way we react to language which contains ungrammatical forms. Rather than simply rejecting the text as ungrammatical, we try to make sense of it. That is, we attempt to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of what the writer intended o convey. (Most people say they understand the 'My Town' text quite easily.) It is this effort to interpret (and to be interpreted), and how we accomplish it, that are the key elements investigated in the study of discourse, to arrive at an interpretation, and to make our messages interpretable, we certainly rely on what we know about linguistic form and structure. But, as language-users, we have more knowledge than that.
Cohesion
We know, for example, that texts must have a certain structure which depends on factors quite different from those required in the structure of a single sentence. Some of those factors are described in terms of cohesion, or the ties and connections which exist within texts. A number of those types of cohesive ties can be identified in the following text:
My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by saving every penny he could. That car would be worth a fortune nowadays. However, he sold if to help pay for my college education. Sometimes I think I 'd rather have the convertible.
There are connections present here in the use of pronouns, which we assume are used to maintain reference (via anaphora) to the same people and things throughout: father – he – he – he; my - my – I; Lincoln – it. There are lexical connections such as a Lincoln convertible - that car - the convertible, and the more general connections created by a number of terms which share a common element of meaning (e.g. 'money') bought - saving - penny - worth a fortune - sold – pay - (e.g. 'time') once - nowadays - sometimes. There is also a connector, However, which marks the relationship of what follows to what went before. The verb tenses in the first four sentences are all in the past, creating a connection between those events, and a different time is indicated by the present tense of the final sentence.
Analysis of these cohesive links within a text gives us some insight into how writers structure what they want to say, and may be crucial factors in our judgments on whether something is well-written or not. It has also been noted that the conventions of cohesive structure differ from one language to the next and may be one of the sources of difficulty encountered in translating texts.
However, by itself, cohesion would not be sufficient to enable us to make sense of what we read. It is quite easy to create a highly cohesive text which has a lot of connections between the sentences, but which remains difficult to interpret. Note that the following text has connections such as Lincoln - the car, red-that color, her-she, letters-a letter, and so on.
My father bought a Lincoln convertible. The car driven by the police was red. That color doesn 't suit her. She consists of three letters. However, a letter isn 't as fast as a telephone call.
It becomes clear from an example like this that the 'connectedness' which we experience in our interpretation of normal texts is not simply based on connections between the words. There must he some other factor which leads us to distinguish connected texts which make sense from those which do not. This factor is usually described as coherence.
Coherence
The key to the concept of coherence is not something which exists in the language, but something which exists in people. It is people who 'make sense' of what they read and hear. They try to arrive at an interpretation which is in line with their experience of the way the world is. Indeed, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to make sense of what we perceive or experience in the world. You may have found, when reading the last example text, that you kept trying to make the text 'fit' some situation or experience which would accommodate all the details. If you work at it long enough, you may indeed find a way to incorporate all those desparate elements into a single coherent interpretation. In doing so, you would necessarily be involved in a process of filling in a lot of 'gaps' which exist in the text. You would have to create meaningful connections which are not actually expressed by the words and sentences. This process is not restricted to trying to understand 'odd' texts. In one way or another, it seems to be involved in our interpretation of all discourse.
It is certainly present in the interpretation of casual conversation. We are continually taking part in conversational interactions where a great deal of what is meant is not actually present in what is said. Perhaps it is the ease with which we ordinarily anticipate each other's intentions that makes this whole complex process seem so unremarkable. Here is a good example, adapted from Widdowson (1978):
Her: That's the telephone
Him: I'm in the bath
Her: O.K.
There are certainly no cohesive ties within this fragment of discourse. How does each of these people manage to make sense of what the other says? They do use the information contained in lie sentences expressed, but there must be something else involved in the interpretation. It has been suggested that exchanges of this type are best understood in terms of the conventional actions performed by the speakers in such interactions. Drawing on concepts derived from the study of speech acts, we can characterize the brief conversation in the following way:
She makes a request of him to perform action
He states reason why he cannot comply with request
She undertakes to perform action
If this is a reasonable analysis of what took place in the conversation, then it is clear that language-users must have a lot of knowledge of how conversational interaction works which is not simply ’linguistic’ knowledge. Trying to describe aspects of that knowledge has been the focus of research by an increasing number of discourse analysts.
Speech events
In exploring what it is that we know about taking part in conversation, or any other speech event (e.g. debate, interview, various types of discussions), we quickly realize that there is enormous variation in what people say and do in different circumstances. In order to begin to describe the sources of that variation, we would have to take account of a number of criteria. For example, we would have to specify the roles of speaker and hearer, or hearers, and their relationships, whether they were friends, strangers, young, old, of equal or unequal status, and many other factors. All of these factors will have an influence on what is said and how it is said. We would have to describe what was the topic of the conversation and in what setting or context it took place. Some of the effects of these factors on the way language is used will be explored in greater detail.Yet, even when we have described all these factors, we will still not have analyzed the actual structure of the conversation itself. As language-users, in a particular culture, we clearly have quite sophisticated knowledge of how conversation works.