An Account of Homonymy in Owere Igbo

Abstract

Meaning relations refer to the organisation of the lexemes of a language in such a way that groups of lexemes that are semantically related by virtue of shared semantic properties are not kept apart, but belong together and form a sub-group within the lexicon of a language. Several types of lexical meaning relations have been recognised in semantic study. These include antonymy,synonymy, polysemy and homonymy. This study is a descriptive work that analysed the phenomenon of homonymy, illustrating from Owere Igbo. The study specifically investigated whether differences exist between the different senses of homonymous lexeme. The study further examined the ways through which homonyms can arise in the language. Twenty two fluent speakers of owere Igbo were interviewed in the course of collecting data for this investigation. Data from our field work revealed that the various meanings of homonyms, lexemes are; in no way related. Our findings further showed that the different and unrelated means of homonyms may or may not belong to the same word class. It was also discovered that factors such as phonetic convergence, semantic divergence, dialectal differences, euphemism and omission of some prosodic features could give rise homonymy in Owere Igbo.