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From: gh@utai.UUCP (Graeme Hirst)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: homonymns vs homophones
Message-ID: <341@utai.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-Jan-85 17:30:06 EST
Article-I.D.: utai.341
Posted: Mon Jan 14 17:30:06 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Jan-85 21:07:35 EST
References: <11900002@hpfcnml.UUCP>
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 29

> In school sets of words such as "sent" and "scent" were called
> homonymns.  I have been corrected and told that these are
> homophones.  I have looked up the definition and the dictionary
> agrees.  It still bothers me that I have old school text books
> that refer to it as a homonymn.  Has the definition changed?
> Is the school book wrong?  Is the common usage different from
> the dictionary's?  What do the linguists out there have to say?
>
>				Robert (animal) Heckendorn


   ``The terminology in this area can be a little confusing.  Strictly
speaking, if we are interested in written language, the homonymous words we are
concerned with are HOMOGRAPHS, that is words where many meanings are associated
with the same lexeme, though different meanings may have different
pronunciations.  For example, the vowel varies in {\sl row} depending on
whether it means {\bf a line of objects} or {\bf a commotion}, but this fact is
of no consequence when dealing with written language.  If we were concerned
with speech recognition, the type of homonyms we would worry about would be
HOMOPHONES -- words that are pronounced the same but possibly spelled
differently, such as {\sl four} and {\sl fore}.  A HETERONYM is a
non-homophonic homograph (Drury, Verbatim 9(3), 1983, 10-11).''

     From ``Semantic Interpretation against ambiguity'' by Graeme Hirst.
[To be published by Cambridge University Press in the series Studies in Natural
Language Processing, Summer or Fall 1985.]
-- 
\\\\   Graeme Hirst    University of Toronto	Computer Science Department
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