A CRITIQUE ON ENGLISH HOMOPHONES AND HOMOGRAPHS

This paper critiques the treatment of English homographs and homophones in linguistic literatures. The study is motivated by the fact that the available data are questionable on the subject, thus calling for re-analysis. Methodologically, the study is a critical analysis of data obtained through a documentary process in secondary reading. The study employs the Semantic Theory and the Referential Theory of Meaning as the basis of data analysis. These theories explain lexemes in terms of how they are articulated and what they refer to. The findings of the analysis reveal that most of the linguistic literatures offer contestable and confusing definitions of homographs/homophones. For instance ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, just like’ profit’ and ‘prophet’, are not homophones though they are regarded as so in some available literature. Also, ‘conduct’ (N) and ‘conduct’ (V) are regarded as homographs but in reality they are not. Therefore, homophones are words with the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings while homographs are words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings as the case of 'live' (verb) /lɪv/ and ‘live’ (adjective) /laɪv/.


INTRODUCTION
Meaning is a matter of concern among philosophers and scholars of language.Meaning covers a variety of language aspects, but there is no agreement on the aspects that a particular meaning really covers.It is not the intent of this paper to perpetuate the debate on meaning as an intangible quality, which, according to Structuralists, has something to do with words that denote beauty, love, goodness, etc.The paper specifically critiques the treatment of homophones and homographs in the available literature by reanalyzing the data available.The paper is couched in Semantic Theory (Lewis 1983) where the meaning of Use and Referential tools is used as the basis of the analysis of Homophones and Homographs.
The confusion among English language learners emanate from what the available literature says about these semantic relations (homographs and homophones) and this has drawn the attention of many scholars of meaning.Though homophones and homographs are the source of this confusion, the major source of the confusion is in most literatures where definitions of the concepts make contestable generalizations.For instance, describing affect and effect, profit and prophet as homophones and 'present and prese'nt as homographs is to encode erroneous information to the readers, thus there is a need to re-visit the treatment of English homophones and homographs in the existing literature.Ibrahim (2018) investigated on homographs and came up with an argument that words with identical spelling and pronunciation, but having different meanings and grammatical functions are homographs.He cited the lexeme 'sow' (verb) -to plant seed and 'sow' (noun)female pig; and the lexeme bear (verb)-to support or carry, and-bear (noun)-an animal, as homographs.However, lexemes of this form are differentiated by suprasegmental or prosodic features and not anything else.This renders Ibrahim's analysis incomplete and misleading.

Previous Literatures
Verhaar ( 2006) conceptualizes homonymy as a relation between two or more words which have the same form but different meanings.To him, the term homonym subsumes both homophone and homograph, i.e., homophones and homographs are homonyms.The question is that, does a homonym imply both homograph and homophone?If that is true, does the etymological meaning of the term homonym relate to the two terms?These questions are quite challenging to dictionary writers, readers, and researchers in general, hence demanding clear answers.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This work uses the Semantic theory (Lewis, 1970(Lewis, , 1983) ) which answers the question 'what is the meaning of this word or that expression?'The theory emphasizes that sentences are (typically) true or false, and that their being true or false depends on the information they encode or express.This 'information' is often called 'the proposition expressed by the sentence' (Plato as cited in Lewis, 1970).This theory is used together with the theory of generative semantics, which focuses on the context of situation as a determinant of meaning (Ramadan and Ababneh, 2013).Thus, understanding of the meaning of Homophones and Homographs depends of the lexemes and the context they refer.With this theory, some of the homophones and homographs have proper names by nature as explained in the scope of Reference Theory, which indicates words and their referents.It must be noted that the signifier and the signified are not new concepts in the context of linguistic semantics.Thus, though this theory has been criticized as it works in explaining concrete words like table, sun, son, door and, house and not in explaining abstract lexemes such as happiness, it fits well in the current study because it deals with lexical or concrete English Homophonous and Homographic words.It should be noted that Reference Theory ought to be used in a restrictive sense, not in the way it is used in the philosophies of language.This is in the sense that homophones and homographs refer to different things or meanings.That is to say, for instance, sea (a water body) is different from the see (vision), as each implies to a different referent (reference in restrictive sense).

METHODOLOGY
The article employs a qualitative research approach whereby words, phrases and sentences were analyzed.Qualitative research explains data descriptively in the form of written or oral words from a person or activity being researched (Moleong, 1991).A critical literature analysis was used to gather data.The author read and evaluated written documents about homophones and homographs and made judgments based on reason (Cf. Mingers, 2000).Here, the researcher read keenly the written documents to identify what is true from what is not true about English homophones and homographs.This was done by evaluating the information and making judgments in order to arrive at a logical conclusion.

Presentation of the findings English Homophones
To the best of my knowledge, these are words with the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings.The same is conceived by Bratiwi, (2019:3) who is of the opinion that a 'homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but has a different meaning or spelling or both'.With this definition, words qualify to be homophones if they have the same pronunciation but different spellings.This definition would not cover the following words which are thought to be homophones in some literatures.See sample 1 below: 1.
(a) Ate (b) Eight The above English lexemes have been described by different scholars (cf.Ibrahim, 2008) as homophones.With reference to our definition of homophones as lexemes having the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings, in this context, the claim made by Ibrahim and other scholars who have written on the topic under discussion is untrue.Ate and eight are pronounced as /eɪt/ as these scholars have described them, thus they seem to be homophonous words.Yet, eight is pronounced as /eɪt/ (especially by American speakers) while ate is pronounced as /et/(especially by British speakers).This means that the pronunciation of the former takes a long duration, with a fortis in it while the pronunciation of the latter takes a short duration with a lenis in it.The same understanding of the same author underlies the treatment of affect and effect as homophones.See Sample 2 below: The data above are usually treated as homophones, but based on the definition of homophones offered above; they do not qualify to be homophones since they differ in pronunciation.Affect is pronounced as /ə'fekt/ and while effect is pronounced /ɪ'fekt/.The understanding of the writers who describe these as homophones is probably influenced or misled by the interpretive theory of meaning (cf, Lakoff, 1974), which takes into account the context of a situation, for instance social status, politeness, formality to mention but a few.Scholars who believe in this tool of analysis tend to generalize homophones as it has been observed (cf.Ibrahim, 2008).The same applies to the data below, which are claimed to be homophones:

(a) Accept (b) Except
The data in 3 are not homophones for they are not pronounced in the same way and they have different spellings and meanings.The lexeme accept is pronounced as /ək'sept/ while its counterpart except is pronounced as /ɪk'sept/.These data (Cf.1-3) are in justification with the tool of analysis, the Semantic Theory, as used in this paper.The case is a different phenomenon in 4 below:

(a) Sea (b) See
The data in 4 prove that the words see (of vision) and sea (of water) are pronounced the same way as /si/ though they have different spellings and meanings.In that case, these lexemes qualify as homophonous English words.The treatment of the data in 4 has much to do with generative semantics theory, which attributes meaning to the context of situation (Ramadan and Ababneh, 2013).This means that the context of 4(a) differs from the context of 4(b), thus understanding each one's context makes it simple for the learners or readers to differentiate homophones from words that are not homophones.
There are other data given by Ibrahim (2008:9) which deviate from what is true about homophones.Ibrahim gives us the following English examples when he defines homophones as words having different spellings and there is nearness in their pronunciation and meaning.See the data in 7 below:

(a) Prince Vs prints (b) Presence Vs present (c) Tense Vs tents
The data in 7 are clearly identified as lexical words which are be considered as homophones less commonly.However, even before transcribing them, the fact that the lexemes in each pair have different pronunciations is quite plain.For example presents cannot be pronounced in the same way as presence.Therefore, these words are not homophones.Within the framework of semantic theory, homophones are have their own meanings (Lewis, 1970), but confusion about their semantic scopes (Cf.7) is triggered by a person's paradigmatic understanding and not by the words' themselves.

Homographs
Homographs have been confusing English writers as the meaning of the term is sometimes not reflected by the data they present.Etymologically, the term homograph is from the Greek: ὁμός, homós, "same" and γράφω, gráphō, "write".Thus, homographs are words that share the same written form but they have different semantic scope or meaning.In other words, homographs are lexemes which have the same spelling but different pronunciation and meanings.One should not be confused by the prosodic features that form part of the pronunciation in natural languages of the world.See the sample in 13 below if they qualify be English Homographs: 13.(a) Well (b) Well (Ibrahim, 2008:13) The lexemes well for 'fine' in 13 (a) and well for 'water' in 13 (b) differ in meaning but their spelling and pronunciation are the same.That is to say, both are articulated as /wel/.Considering explanations given earlier, it is clear that these lexemes are not homographs simply because they are not pronounced differently.Richard, (2019) defines homographs are words that have the same spelling but differ in meaning and sometimes pronunciation.The term sometimes in his definition is problematic, it means that the pronunciation of homographs can be the same or not in some contexts.Richard gave us the following examples of homographs to reflect his definition: The data in ( 14) are words that have different meanings and pronunciations.Their prosodic features in their articulation should not confuse anyone e.g.conduct (noun) is pronounced as /kɒndʌkt/ and conduct (verb) is pronounced as /kə'ndʌkt/.It must be noted that prosodic features such as stress and tone cannot trigger changes at the vowel or consonant level e.g.x to y or/and [ɒ] > [ʌ] but they can do so at the level beyond segments as explained in suprasegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976).With this understanding, the lexeme conduct qualifies to be a homographic word.

DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS
Homophonous lexemes are words that are pronounced the same but have different spelling.So, words like accept and except are not homophones because they are pronounced differently.Likewise, well (water) and well (fine) found in Ibrahim (2008) are not homophones though they are pronounced in the same way and have different meanings since their spelling is the same: it qualifies to be a homonym.True homophones are words such as bred and bread (Gorfein, 2008:13) since they are pronounced similarly but their meanings and spellings are different.
Homographs also should be treated with care, not all words listed in some documents qualify to be homographs.The definition of homograph should base on phonetic and phonological reasons.Some scholars have offered good definitions of the term homograph.For instance, Palmer (1984:101), Allan (1986:151) Gramley and Pätzold (1991:13) and Richards & Schmidt (2002:241) agree that homographs are words that are written in the same way but pronounced differently and have different meanings.Well known examples of homographs are lead (metal) and lead/ (guide).To this point, I agree with them.However, it is to be noted that when a scholar goes on arguing, he or she reaches a point where she/he makes a mistake.This is what Richards & Schmidt have done in some sorts.For example, though their definition of homograph makes sense, Schmidt and Richard (2002:241) argue that the term 'homograph' is sometimes used interchangeably with the term 'homonym', something which is wrong as far as a homograph is all about.Ibrahim (2008:25-29) presents a list of 8 words that he treats as homographs in his research.These are: well, sow, fine, evening, second, does and lead.Within this list, only one lexeme, particularly lead, qualifies to be a homograph.The rest do not.However, homographs are being words that have different pronunciations and meanings but their spelling should is the same.See the sample in 15 below:

Figure 1 :
15. Live This lexeme is a true English homograph because it is pronounced differently and has different semantic scopes e.g.lives as in /lɪv/ classed in the group of verb and live as in /laɪv/ placed in the adjective category.Consider the following examples in 15 below: 15.(a) They /lɪv/ at Magomen (b) The match is /laɪv/ now The sentences in 15 (a) and (b) attest evidence that live /liv/ and live /laiv/ are homographs as the two sentences feature the same lexical form live but it is pronounced differently and bears different meanings.As homographs and homophones prove to be confusing, I develop a framework which can help us to know what homophone and homograph are and what are not: This is presented in the figure below.The meaning of homophone, homograph and homonymThe figure above indicates the three concepts and their specification of meaning.For the case of homophones X=Y stands lexemes that are similar at the phonetic level (articulation) hence forth